‘You can’t just let them fucking take over’: The Mat Wakeham interview

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Jake Zawlacki | March 18, 2025

“Celebrate 25 years of the Phoo Action universe created by the creative polymath Jamie Hewlett and long-time collaborator Mat Wakeham, with this definitive Silver Jubilee compilation of comics, scripts, and an assortment of behind-the-scenes material of the franchise.” – Solicit for Phoo Action

In reading the above solicit for Phoo Action, my first thought was, “Wait, who’s Mat Wakeham?” which, in retrospect, is a surprising reaction considering just how close Wakeham was to the British indie comic scene of the early ‘90s. And by “close,” I mean he was literally right there with Jamie Hewlett, Alan Martin, Philip Bond, Peter Milligan, Steve and Glyn Dillon, and others, hanging out in Worthing, contributing to Deadline magazine, tagging along on the Tank Girl set in Los Angeles, and eventually pitching a sequel of sorts to Hewlett’s Get the Freebies. Now, to celebrate its silver jubilee, Phoo Action has finally found its way to proper publication.

Phoo Action is my kind of book: a carefully curated assemblage of comics, art, photographs, scripts, and ephemera that brings a lost gem back into the collective consciousness. Phoo Action also offers a compelling story as to how it was made, and much more often, how it wasn’t. Additionally, we get the fully collected Get the Freebies for the first time in English, a new Phoo Action prose novel written by Wakeham with illustrations by Philip Bond, and the original script and storyboards for the pilot episode for BBC. As both an archive and an art object in itself, Hewlett and Wakeham’s Phoo Action presents a satisfying completion to what would have otherwise amounted to a series of false starts, cancelled deals, and dashed hopes.

For Hewlett, we can see Phoo Action as filling the creative gap between Tank Girl, its panned film production, and his superstardom as co-creator of Gorillaz. But if Phoo Action is anything, it’s a testament to the resiliency of Wakeham’s creative vision. Sure, there have been respites in the quarter century-long project since Phoo Action was planned and pitched, but the itch was never quite scratched, bringing Wakeham back to these characters again and again.

The book also stands as a cautionary tale to eager creators looking to sign the first deal in front of them, to put their heart and soul out into the world for all to see, and to finally get paid for all their hard work. While those are understandable impulses, reading the book as well as hearing Wakeham discuss it here, may spark some introspection.

Mat and I spoke through computer screens for hours about Phoo Action, living in Worthing, his role in Gorillaz, the genius of Jamie Hewlett, Wakeham’s meditation practice, what it means to be creative, and why superheroes are preposterous. The initial transcript was long, but through editing, asking more questions, expanding answers, relishing in the lack of digital page counts, adding images from his personal collection, Britishizing spellings, and arriving at 71 occurrences of the word “fuck,” it’s become epic.

It’s Mat Wakeham.

JAKE ZAWLACKI: All right, let’s start at the beginning. The big question everyone has is how you and Jamie Hewlett began working together, which you cover in the book introduction in a great story. I’m curious about who you were before you met him as a student in Worthing. What kind of things were you making? Who were your influences? What motivated you?

MAT WAKEHAM: That’s a very good question. I’ve got to think a long way back. We’re talking 1988? I was very young. 17. What were my influences? A lot of childhood ones still, I suppose. '70s U.S. superhero TV, cartoons, Hanna Barbera, G Force, and pop music, but it was the late '80s and I was massively into the first wave of hip-hop – Afrika Bambaataa, Run DMC, Stetsasonic, and Acid House too. British alternative comedy, The Young Ones and The Comic Strip Presents, were big cultural influences for my whole generation. We used to quote them in the playground. Outside of that, British folklore, the old gods and monsters, and Tolkein. Martial arts. Like everyone who grew up in the '70s I had wanted to be Bruce Lee at some point, then later, I fell for the lures of Arnie and Sly … but artistically I wanted to be a comic book artist. Which I guess all fits together. There’s a synergy.

I went to the local art school, which is Northbrook College of Art and Design, to do the B-Tech in graphic design. As a working-class kid, from a blue-collar family, I had no idea about anything creative as a career path. I just knew I wanted to work in comics, but I didn’t have a clue how you actually did that for a living. Someone – I can’t even remember who – had suggested graphic design as a way in, probably because it had an illustration element to it. My dad worked in the local factory. He was an engineer there. My mum, what was she doing? At that time, I think she was working for my cousin’s cleaning supplies firm. I didn’t have a clue about the creative industry. I remember asking my dad when I was a kid, “How do you get a job as an artist?” And he said to me, “You don’t." I look back on it now, and think … fuck, was he right? But there’s a double-edged sword there, isn’t there? The creative sector is one of our largest export industries in the UK. So, anyway, I went to art school.

Comics wise, I was reading Love and Rockets at the time. But also shit like The Freak Brothers. 2000 AD of course. All comics heads in the UK read that. What was coming out? The Killing Joke just came out, Watchmen.

What we call the “British Invasion”?

They weren’t an invasion for me. I live here. It was the burgeoning Renaissance of British comics. I was into that work. Steve Dillon was doing the werewolves Judge Dredd story. Brett Ewins was doing Bad Company. Brendan McCarthy and Pete Milligan had done Strange Days. Grant Morrison and Steve Yeowell were working on Zenith in 2000. It’s like the British Invasion of musicians in the ’60s, where they were taking the American music they loved, repackaging it, and sending it back with their own spin. British comic creators were absorbing all these influences and turning them into something uniquely their own.

My graphic design tutor, Mike Skinner, who had also taught Jamie and Alan [Martin], mentioned there were others who had studied at the school who were into comics. Little did I know! I had no clue about them when I started, but it didn’t take long to find out that Alan, Jamie, and Philip [Bond] had put together Atom Tan while they were students. They took it to the UK Comic Convention, where Brett Ewins and Steve Dillon saw it and brought them on board for Deadline. My first term started in September 1988, and Deadline #1 hit the shelves that October. Right place, right time.

So, yeah, I started school in September, and then Tank Girl came out in October. Everyone on my course was like, “Fuck yeah! We’re into this.” Then we very quickly found out, “Oh my god, they were in the years before us and had just left!”

So it seemed very possible.

It seemed totally possible – it really did – but at the same time, it was pretty intimidating. Jamie, Alan, and Philip weren’t working on a fanzine with the idea that in three years’ time, they’d be exactly where they wanted to be. I mean, sure that was the ambition, but to dream’s one thing, making it real, that’s rare. And, if you look at how Jamie’s work evolved over that period, it’s insane. The level he reached and what he was drawing by the time he was working on Tank Girl #1 compared to his art for “Max Nasty,” “Sexy Barmaid,” or the one page ad for the proto “Tank Girl” in Atom Tan #1. I shit you not. It’s crazy. Anyway, that was my plan too, to follow that path.

You meet Jamie and then Alan, and eventually you make it into the pages of Deadline magazine yourself. I found “Mr. Wonky” credited to both you and Alan Martin in issue 17, promising a story in the next issue, but didn’t make it until #23. What’s the story behind “Mr. Wonky”?

Well, actually, Mr. Wonky was the secret agent of the Groovy Goggle Gang. If you go back through Deadline and Tank Girl, Alan and Jamie were always inserting little three panel strips or half or three-quarter page asides that might take the form of promotional giveaway items or coming soon ideas, but always with some sort of satirical twist. The Groovy Goggle Gang started like this before becoming a one pager itself. So, it was just a joke. We’d all been mucking around at Jamie’s flat while he and Alan were working, and he had all sorts of things. I think I say in the book how the inside of Jamie’s flat was like the inside of Tank Girl’s tank. Full of things everywhere. Piles of magazines and records, postcards, toy guns, plants with names, silly hats, second hand military paraphernalia and such like. Among it all he had a pair of swimming goggles hanging up. Somebody put them on and pulled their eyes open like that. [Peels eyelids open] And everyone was laughing. Everyone tried them on and then started taking photographs. We’re all art school idiots, right? Then you photocopy them and put them together and do a collage on top of Robert DeNiro’s body from Taxi Driver, of course.

Voila. Before we knew it, there was this thing called the Groovy Goggle Gang. It started off as just a one-panel joke about a bunch of shit-for-brains mercenaries for hire, trying to save the world or whatever, kind of like a proto-anarchist, human rights, eco-warrior version of the A-Team. Then, later on, we did Mr. Wonky – the Groovy Goggle Gang’s “most secret agent,” apparently. Whatever that means.

I remember this one time, there was an interview with Jamie and Alan for a TV show on Channel4 called Buzz (I think). It was super fast-paced, hyperkinetic editing, in that early ‘90s, MTV-inspired style. They wanted a piece on Tank Girl and its creators, so Jamie and Alan came up with the idea of having me appear as Mr. Wonky. It was basically an extension of the joke world they were building in the comics, a little throwaway gag within the larger story. The idea was that Mr. Wonky was their special agent for providing them with offbeat, swearing vernacular.

So there I was, sitting in a chair wearing this flowery sun hat, which Jamie or Alan had named “The Penelope Keith Hat.” Penelope Keith was an actress from the ‘70s, known for playing an uptight, middle-class housewife on the British sitcom The Good Life and the hat looked like something her character would have worn. I had the hat on, along with a pair of swimming goggles, my eyes wide open, dribbling, and talking nonsense. They basically just shoved a camera in my face and said, “Be funny.” So I did my thing, acting like a performing monkey, and then they filmed Jamie and Alan riding around the local park on their ‘70s Raleigh Chopper bikes, doing skids and wheelies. Highbrow stuff.

We were just a bunch of kids having fun, and getting to put whatever we were laughing about that week or month into print was a blast. I recently watched the excellent Mignola: Drawing Monsters documentary about Hellboy, and I was struck by how similar that period was to our own. Mike Mignola, Steve Purcell, and Arthur Adams all lived in the same building together, old art-school friends who’d become comic professionals, working, hanging out, goofing off, and putting that real-life chemistry into their work. It felt like a parallel to our scene in Worthing, with Jamie, Alan, Philip, Glyn, me, and a bunch of other young creatives, musicians, and old art school friends, all just doing our thing.

A couple of years later, you wrote an issue of Planet Swerve. At this point, did you think your future was in comics? Or, as you were saying, did it feel like you were just messing around with this magazine?

I wasn’t the main writer on Planet Swerve, that was Alan and Glyn’s thing. It was their love letter to sci-fi, art school students, and flower power. However, they did hand over the reins for one guest writer episode, and that’s where I took the opportunity to kill off one of the central characters in a dramatic collision with a gang of intergalactic alien Mods looking for a fight with hippie types. It also featured some questionable transgender imagery and themes, mixed with Hindu mythology, which nearly got Deadline pulled from the shelves, at least that’s what the publisher told me. Anyway, that was my one point of entry into the Planet Swerve universe, and it left Alan with some head-scratching to do in terms of amending the story world. Sorry about that, Al!

Other than that, I had no real sense of what my future looked like. I knew I was into story, art, graphic design, films, music, TV – just culture in general – but I had no clue where it would all lead. I didn’t really know what my entry point was going to be, and post my first stint at art school I didn’t necessarily think it would be comics.

When money was getting tight, and I thought, “I really should buckle down and get a job,” I’d go to interviews, check out what creative jobs were available. I’d have meetings, and people would tell me, “You’re too creative.” And I’d be like, “What the fuck does that mean? How can you be too creative for a creative job?” Now, as a senior creative myself, I get what they were trying to say. I wasn’t as singularly focussed as someone like Jamie, who just draws comics. That’s his thing. He’s really good at capturing the zeitgeist, capturing lightning in a bottle over and over. He’s got this mental rolodex of pop culture, and he can tap into it effortlessly, adding detail and nuance in a way that’s pretty mind-blowing. But Jamie doesn’t cartoon, produce films, write books, do graphic design or host embodiment podcasts. He’s focussed on cartooning. Me? I’ve always had a broader range of interests, and that’s why I was just into making things, expressing myself. I never thought comics would be the only thing I’d end up doing.

When I first went to art school, I thought maybe I was going to draw comics. But as soon as I got there, I opened up a bit. We were doing life drawing, printmaking, photography, different experiments – it was a graphic design course, after all. And I realized I liked all kinds of creative work. So I quickly pulled away from the idea of just focussing on comics. Also, then I met Philip and Jamie, and I started feeling a lot of self-doubt. I thought, “Why am I even bothering to try when these guys are doing that?” They were so focussed, so skilled and talented, and it felt like they had it all figured out. But looking back, I shouldn’t have compared myself to them. The thing is, I did. I was so caught up in what they were doing, thinking I had to measure up or follow the same path. But that’s the trap, right? You can’t compare yourself to other people. Everyone’s got their own thing, their own journey. You just need to focus on your own work, on what you want to say, and not worry about what anyone else is doing or what they think you should be doing. It’s about finding your own voice and expressing yourself, no one else’s expectations. But at the time, I didn’t really get that. I was young, and it’s so easy to get lost in that comparison game, thinking you should be doing what they’re doing or that you’re not enough. You just have to block that out and keep working on your own thing, even if it takes time to figure out what that is.

When you’re young, you’re trying to develop your craft, and I had such a wide focus that I wasn’t honing any one skill. Jamie, on the other hand, would sit and draw for hours and hours. I did that for a while, I was always drawing up until about the age of 18 but then, I’m gonna be really candid, I discovered hallucinogens. Hallucinogens took me away from the drawing desk. They propelled me out into the universe and deep into inner space and big questions about life. It’s like, drawing suddenly felt small compared to everything else going on in my head.

Existential?

Yeah, really existential. Big time. I was interested in everything. Philosophy. Theosophy. Cultural theory. I wasn’t career focused at all. I did bits and pieces because it was fun and I could.

That makes sense because you mentioned doing design for Fireball and then I saw you have a credit for the logo design of Peter Milligan’s Egypt.

Yeah. Graphic design. Logos. Both for Fireball and Egypt. I did some Fireball merch with Jamie too as well as odd bits and pieces for him and Alan on Tank Girl.

Those are some random credits to have. You’re in this milieu of UK colleagues, all these people, but you seem to be on the edge…

We all lived pretty close to each other. Look, I shared a flat with Alan Martin and before that Alan’s mum and dad lived just up the road from mine, so Alan would walk down to my place, knock on my door, not too early mind you, or I’d pop up to his where he had a photocopy machine, and we’d knock something together on that, maybe a poster or a fanzine of some sort, before heading into town together. Sometimes, we’d go down to the seafront, grab a cup of tea at this café where we all used to meet. We’d sit around chatting about films, books, music, art, culture, you name it. Alan always had his notepad with him, scribbling stuff down, and Jamie would be back at his place, where we’d inevitably end up, waiting on Alan, saying “I really need you to finish this script.” I mean, this was such a regular occurrence with those two that this dynamic ended up, at least once, on the pages of the comics themselves. It was a scene.

I had flats with both Alan and Glyn Dillon at different times. We were all living in each other’s pockets. Alan and Jamie shared a flat, and Philip lived right next door to Jamie. Alan, Jamie, and Philip had all had multiple flat shares over the years. It was a small town, and since we all went to the same art school, it just made sense that we’d stick together. We were a proper group of mates. We worked together, hung out together.

Every Friday without fail, we’d go to the same pub. They’d have a happy hour where you could get two pints for the price of one. After that, we’d hit the local nightclub, dancing to indie music. In fact, we even decorated the inside of that nightclub with collages, paintings, and drawings in exchange for free entry. It was just one of those times when everything felt connected, like we were all part of something, even if we didn’t quite know what that “something” was at the time.

It sounds like the early nineties indie comic equivalent of the Parisian cafe scene in the twenties.

We wanted it to be. And we tried. Something like the Beatnik scene, or the Merry Pranksters: wild, freewheeling, full of creative energy. We wanted to be like the South Bank too, where you could imagine ideas flying around like sparks in smoky rooms. We idolized those kinds of creative communities: Warhol’s Factory, hippy communes, and their British equivalents, like the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and the Bloomsbury Set. We weren’t just inspired by highbrow art movements; we loved the absurd and anarchic too. So as much as we loved Dada’s nonsense and Bauhaus’ rebellion we saw clear connections to The Goon Show’s mocking of post-war British conformity, Monty Python upending everything sacred, and the hilarious '80s alternative comedy railing against Thatcherism. It was all part of the same thread: rejecting tradition, breaking the rules, and having a laugh doing it.

But the reality? We were in Worthing. A crap little seaside town in Thatcher’s Britain, where communities were gutted, and the whole place just felt deflated, like the air had been let out of everything. We were idealizing all that bohemian, countercultural glamour in a landscape more Mike Leigh than Andy Warhol, a kind of Life is Sweet version of creative rebellion with comics thrown in.

We called ourselves The Big Underwear Comics Society. There’s a name to conjure with, isn’t it? It was tongue-in-cheek, a nod to the ridiculousness of it all. We were like the South Bank, but on the South Coast. And instead of dazzling sophisticates, we were . . . well, idiots. As Logan Roy would later say about his kids in Succession: “These are not serious people.” Only, we were serious. Deadly serious: about satire, about fun, about art, about music. [Laughs]

It was our way of thumbing our noses at the world, taking the piss out of high art while trying to make something meaningful ourselves. There was something deeply transgressive about it too. We weren’t just drawing comics; we were skewering the conventions of a country that seemed to have had the creativity beaten out of it by decades of economic austerity and cultural conservatism.

In a way, it was absurdly ambitious. The Warhols and Pre-Raphaelites had their lofts and salons; we had the back bedrooms of rented houses and flats with posters covering the crappy wallpaper, tatty, smoky pubs and seaside cafes. But that ambition, that sense of striving for something, was there. We were taking those highbrow ideals, the Pre-Raphaelite devotion to beauty, the Bloomsbury intellectualism, the Merry Pranksters’ narcotics-induced counter-culture energy, and dragging them through a distinctly British filter, where they came out the other side battered, beer and tea-stained, and somehow more authentically our own.

Comics were the perfect medium for it at that time. They’re inherently rebellious, and transgressive, a space where high art and lowbrow humour collide in four colour separation. They’re made for outsiders, for people who don’t fit in and don’t care to. And that’s what we were: outsiders. But at least we were outsiders together, dreaming big in a crap little town.

This environment helps to explain your gonzo sensibilities. Considering the ways psychedelics influenced you on an existential and spiritual level, how much was literature, especially of writers like Hunter S. Thompson, part of your development and interests?

Hunter S. Thompson’s writing, and the way he lived, was a huge influence on me. Not just the gonzo style, though that was part of it, but the whole ethos: the full-throttle, no-holds-barred approach to art and life. But he wasn’t working in isolation. He was part of this bigger thread, this massive lineage of countercultural writers and artists, and I was drawn to all of it. The Beatniks before him, for example, “stoned immaculate” as Jim Morrison would’ve said, were like the start of this weird family tree of rebellion and creativity.

Ginsberg had a particularly big impact on me. Alan Martin loved Kerouac, but I never really vibed with him in the same way. Kerouac felt like someone who’d burned out, you know? He started out exploring Eastern philosophy and then ended up this embittered, alcoholic Catholic. Ginsberg, though, he was something else. He inspired a generation to break out of the stiff, repressive attitudes of the time and focus on art, beauty, pleasure, self-knowledge. His writing, his life, his whole energy, it opened the door for me to explore my own path. It’s through Ginsberg that I found Tibetan Buddhism, which eventually led me to Theravāda Buddhism. It felt like a natural progression, moving toward something that emphasized mindfulness, clarity, and a kind of direct, no-nonsense pursuit of self knowledge.

Of course, it wasn’t all calm enlightenment back then. I was as much drawn to the hedonism as I was to the insight. That’s where Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters come into it, their Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test world, with Neal Cassady behind the wheel, transforming from Kerouac’s Dean Moriarty into this larger-than-life, LSD-fuelled superhero, literally driving the whole thing forward. That mythology was irresistible to me.

And it doesn’t stop there. The thread runs deep, all the way from Aldous Huxley’s Doors of Perception to Tim Leary’s acid evangelism which inspired the Freebies’ Albert Squares spiking of The Face Magazine Christmas party in Jamie’s Get the Freebies, Kesey’s “Further” bus, and Ginsberg’s Be-Ins high on Owsley Stanley’s White Lightning. It’s all connected, from the psychedelic highs to the eventual crash. Manson, the CIA, the brown acid at Woodstock. It’s a story of rebellion, creativity, and excess, constantly cycling back on itself.

That lineage winds its way through everything that’s shaped me. It’s Lou Reed frozen in a Mick Rock frame, Iggy Pop painted silver and off his head, Bowie in Berlin, punk smashing through, rave culture rising out of the ashes. It’s Blake and Shelley, the mystics and the visionaries, meeting Buddha somewhere along the way. And yeah, even Andy Warhol, Albert Hofmann, and George Harrison funding The Rutles at a CBGB’s after-party in Ibiza. That’s the chaos and creativity ouroboros I’ve always been drawn to, constantly eating its own arse and spitting out something new.

And that’s barely scratching the surface. You could say that’s just the psychedelic, queer, white-boy counterculture tip of the iceberg. I haven’t even touched on the rest of it, the massive intersectional, inter-dimensional influences. Angela Davis, obviously. Spike Lee. She’s Gotta Have It and Do the Right Thing blew my mind. George Clinton. Gil Scott-Heron, of course. The Revolution Will Not Televised, Whitey On the fucking Moon! Fela Kuti. Jimi Hendrix. Grace Jones. Prince. His goddamn royal purpleness. The Last Poets. Shit, James Baldwin! Bell Hooks! Grandmaster Flash. Benjamin Zephaniah. Don Letts. Chuck D! You get the picture. Fight the bloody Power! The whole crew of the Intergalactic P-Funk Mothership. And then there’s the late ‘70s ska-punky-reggae scene, where suddenly Ginsberg pops up again on a Clash album like some beatnik Zelig, high on impromptu prose poetry and the gravitational pull of pretty British punk boys. It’s all in the mix, swirling together into this messy, brilliant, impossible cocktail of influences. I see the world through a tangle of pop culture, counterculture, and cultural theory – everything connects, everything cross-pollinates, and I’m always tracing the through-lines between them. Real or imagined, y’know?

I remember being at Megatripolis in London, tripping on LSD, watching Timothy Leary live-streamed on this clunky early internet broadcast. It felt like all the pieces were colliding, technology, counterculture, psychedelics, and the sense that we were all just on the edge of something huge and undefined. What I took from all of this wasn’t just the hedonism or the thrill of altered states, though there was plenty of that. It was the search for something bigger. For insight, understanding, connection. Over time, that wild pursuit of exuberance and experience gave way to something quieter and more deliberate. I moved beyond the psychedelics and into meditation, beyond the chemical highs to a practice rooted in presence and stillness. But that energy, that rebellious spirit, is still there. It’s just channelled differently now.

All of these influences resurface in the Phoo Action prose novel I’ve written for the book. The spiritual questioning, the countercultural energy, the constant challenging of norms. It’s all in there, woven through the story. There’s this relentless drive to explore bigger questions about identity, power, and freedom, but it’s done with the same surreal humour and anarchic spirit that defines the whole Phoo Action universe. It’s not just about rebellion for rebellion’s sake; it’s about pushing boundaries and smashing expectations, while still having a laugh along the way. That blend of the spiritual and the absurd, the profound, the profane, and the ridiculous, is at the heart of the novel. It’s all the chaos and questioning of counterculture filtered through the lens of satire and superheroic madness.

Are these some of the underpinnings of The Body Knows Podcast you hosted?

Okay, yeah, sure. Let’s talk about that. I hosted the podcast with my wife for a year. We devised that during Covid. Something we could collaborate on together while we, and the rest of the world, were stuck in the house with no one else to talk to. It seemed like a good idea. And a lot of this stuff pops up in there. Especially in the episodes with my friend, integrative psychedelic therapist Michelle Baker Jones, my Buddhist meditation master Ajahn Sucitto, and the inspirational psychedelic anthropologist, explorer, documentarian, and ecological activist Bruce Parry. Through these conversations, we explored the intersections of psychedelics, spirituality, and embodied wisdom. They reflect tangentially back on how my journey, from gonzo counterculture to meditative stillness, has evolved and continues to inform my creative and spiritual practices, albeit from an entirely different entry point of well-being.

This helps frame your story in Penthouse Comix #33, the last issue, with artist Philip Bond. At first I was unsure of how a comic in Penthouse would be the key moment for Jamie to bring you into Phoo Action, but there’s this absurdist, gonzo, erotic style that Phoo Action would pick up on. Not as explicitly so, but it’s still there.

The thing is though, I’d just come straight out of undergraduate art school. I’d left Worthing, everyone was doing their thing, and I realized that actually all of that stuff wasn’t my thing. I was contributing bits and pieces. I was doing bits of graphic design. I was contributing bits of dialogue. I was part of it, but actually it wasn’t my thing. I went off to do something else by myself. I went and did a fine art degree. There I got very deep into cultural studies.

So, I return to Worthing and Philip’s got this offer to do a Penthouse comic and it’s Dave Elliott, who was the former Deadline editor, who’s the editor of Penthouse Comix then. So he knew me and — I can’t remember how it got to me writing it, but I did write it. It’s quite uncomfortable. I tried to write something that would actually be unsettling. I look back at it’s like why are you trying to fucking upset this applecart? Why didn’t you just write an erotic comic? I wrote this thing that was part absurdist, part transgressive and it’s only the second comic I’d ever written and it’s overwritten.

I’m not particularly proud of that work. Philip’s artwork in it is fantastic. He really nailed it. But my writing? Not so much. Not just the form, but the content too. Looking back, there’s this uncomfortable realization that it was steeped in the kind of male entitlement we didn’t even realize we had at the time.

In the '90s, there was this feeling that we’d seen off all the specters of racism and sexism, all that overt race-baiting and misogyny that had been staples of mainstream British culture in the '70s and '80s. We thought we’d moved past it. Apartheid was over, Thatcher was out, the National Front and the British far-right were defeated, or so we believed. So there was this big ironic laugh we thought we could all have at it now, like, “Oh, wasn’t that awful? But look how enlightened we are.”

The truth is, that was just our privilege talking. It was us — young, white men — thinking we were above it all, parodying the bigotry of previous generations but not really understanding what we were playing with and how it still underpinned everything. And when you look back at some of the stuff from that period, this comic included, along with things like Loaded magazine and Blur doing their whole Benny Hill routine with Page 3 girls, it’s just more of the same, repackaged as irony. We weren’t as clever or as progressive as we thought we were, and it’s uncomfortable to admit, but it’s true.

I was trying to write something absurdist like the Marquis de Sade meets Carry On and it’s just not that. It doesn’t land. It’s not as clever, subversive, or even funny as I thought it was at the time. Instead, it ends up being this clumsy attempt at something provocative that just comes across as misguided. Looking back, I can see what I was trying to do, but I just didn’t have the skill, or, frankly, the awareness, to pull it off. It feels like I was pushing buttons for the sake of it without really understanding the bigger picture.

For the quality of the average Penthouse Comix, it’s pretty unique.

But that’s just what I was like at the time. If someone gave me an opportunity, my first thought was, “Okay, how can I fuck with this?” That was my attitude, always about pushing the limits and then stepping right over them. Edgelord-ery, plain and simple. That’s what it was. It was everywhere back then, from Ren & Stimpy to stuff like Jackass and Vice Magazine, where it was all about shock for the sake of it, just seeing how far you could push things. But there were times when it actually worked. Chris Morris with Brass Eye – genius. He made you laugh and squirm, but there was always a point to it. That’s the difference, really – pushing boundaries because you’ve got something to say versus just seeing how far you can go. At the time, though, I definitely had a tendency to be in the second camp.

That said, I can still see what Jamie might’ve seen in it. I know what I was aiming for, even if I didn’t hit the mark, and I think Jamie thought he could take that energy and guide it into something more. In Get the Freebies, Jamie was absolutely riding that wave too, but he did it with so much style. He had this incredible knack for taking that edgy, provocative energy and making it feel sharp, clever, and visually stunning. It worked. But for me, coming back to it all these years later, to write those characters and that world, I’ve had to look at it differently. I’ve had to balance it out, really reflect on the time, the culture, and what we were all tapping into back then. It’s not just about the style or the edge; it’s about understanding what it all meant and where it sits now.

Anyway, by that point, his and Alan’s working relationship had kind of broken down. Hollywood had properly broken them both. Alan had said, “I’m fucking out of here,” and just distanced himself from it all. The Tank Girl movie got completely panned at the time, and while I think that’s a bit unwarranted — it was a big swing, and lots of people love it now — Alan and Jamie weren’t two of those people. They both hated it. So Alan just fucked off. By then, Jamie had done the twelve Get the Freebies comics on his own, and they were brilliant. I think Jamie’s so undervalued as a writer. People see the fun and the jokes and the playfulness, but they don’t realize how much story and character he packs in there. Those comics are three pages long, sometimes four, and maybe a third of the space is given over to this elaborate fart joke, and yet he still tells these big, layered stories. It’s deceptively good writing.

But I think Jamie was lonely at that point. He’d been working on his own for a while, and I think he liked the sense of ingenuity and energy I brought to the table, even if I didn’t have the polish. I don’t want to bang on about that Penthouse Comix story too much, though, because, like I said, it’s crap. I don’t want people rushing out to dig it up and start talking about it too much, you know? It’s one of those things that’s best left buried. Trust me. The work we did together on the second season of comics, to be titled Phoo Action. That was something else entirely though.

At the time, you’re trying to become a music video director in London. This is ’97, after your arts degree. You’ve been working in comics, you’ve been working in a bunch of other stuff. What led you to finally pick music video director? As you’re saying, you’re kind of a polymath, you’re looking at all these different options. What led you to that?

Well, when I was doing my fine art degree, I found myself getting more and more drawn to film as a medium. It just felt like the ultimate art form. It has everything a comic book has, but then you add set design, music, costumes, sound design, cinematography, performance; it includes all the plastic arts. It’s this complete manipulation of reality, and yet people accept it as truth more readily than any other art form. I just found that absolutely fascinating. The thing is, I’d done a fine art degree, not film school, and, like I said earlier, I didn’t have anyone in my family guiding me, saying, “This is how you become an artist.” So, you don’t. You just fumble your way through and figure it out as you go. If I’d known at 18 what I know now, I’d have gone to study film and worked my way through the film industry. But that wasn’t my path. I kind of stumbled into it sideways.

It all started with music videos. They were massive back then. I started directing them in ’97 or ’98, just after leaving art school. I moved to London, got a job, and ended up staying with a girl whose ex was this established music video director. He’d just set up his own company, and she phoned him up on my behalf. I wasn’t even thinking about work at the time, never thinking, “What’s my next career move?” She arranged for me to meet him, and I just blathered on about art and music and film, and somehow, he gave me a job as a runner. I wouldn’t have gotten that chance myself. I wasn’t out there hustling for work or planning some grand trajectory. I was always more focussed on what I could experience and what was next. Honestly, at the time, I was way more interested in where the next party was. Not in a reckless way, but in this wide-eyed, "What’s out there to discover?" kind of way. It wasn’t about work. It was about life. Not in a …

Shallow, just-to-get-drunk way?

No, I wasn’t like, “Where’s the brewskis at?” The party scene when I moved to London was completely different. It was all the people who were rapidly becoming the Britpop stars. It was continuing what we’d been doing in Worthing when we were trying to recreate some kind of Left Bank vibe. It was about becoming part of this massive cultural moment, this big, burgeoning scene. That’s what I was always chasing, being in the middle of something creative, expressive and alive.

It’s not that I didn’t care about what I was doing for work, it was creative and laden with potential. But I was still more interested in what gigs I could go to, what music I could hear, what art and film I could see, and what conversations I could have. Mostly, anyway. That was what mattered to me. Although I was beginning to get more focussed on what I could create and what my contribution could be. I wasn’t just looking to work as a means to an end.

Most party scenes don’t feel that creative.

It was super, super creative. Everything about it. The whole scene felt like this massive kickback against the mainstream. You could hear it in the pop lyrics too. In Pulp’s song “Mis-Shapes,” Jarvis Cocker sings about misfits uniting and challenging the mainstream. That was exactly it. All of us weirdos, all the art school idiots in thrift store clothes, the ones the football hooligans used to want to beat up, suddenly, we were taking hold of the culture. And not just that, we were being embraced and celebrated for it. It was incredible to be around all of that, right in the middle of it. But at the same time, I was starting to think, “What can I do? How can I build my career and contribute to all of this?” I knew I had to figure it out and make something happen.

I guess I’m contradicting myself a bit here. When I say I wasn’t focussed on what I was doing work-wise, I mean being a music video director wasn’t a job-job, not a regular wage or anything like that. Not unless you were one of the big ones, the Michel Gondrys, Chris Cunnghams or Mark Romeneks. Being a music video director back then was pitching ideas to record companies. They’d send out cassettes of new singles to a select group of directors, and you’d have to pitch your ideas for free. That was the gig.

But before all that, I was a runner. One day, a tape came in that none of the directors on the roster wanted, and the team knew I wanted to direct. They said, “Mat, why don’t you write a treatment for it? It’s good practice, and we’ll send it off.” So I did. And they sent it off. And I got the job. Looking back, I can see why. I could write, I was visually literate, and I’d just done a fine art degree. Plus, I’d spent my formative years immersed in the avant-garde of the British comic scene, so I had all of this weird visual and narrative vocabulary floating around in my head. I wrote the treatment, and they let me do it. It was just a small dance music video, but it was something. Apart from the Tank Girl movie, it was the first proper set I stepped onto as a professional, and I was the director. I was shit scared. Absolutely terrified.

Someone’s going to find out.

Yeah, the reality police were definitely circling. “No, no, son, you’re nicked. Off you fuck.” That’s how it felt. The night before I went on set, I shaved my hair into a Travis Bickle mohawk, like that was going to somehow give me presence or get me into the right mindset. But honestly, I was drowning in self-doubt. Massive imposter syndrome. I didn’t know what I was doing, but I just got on with it.

I had hired a great Director of Photography, though, and he was brilliant. He framed up exactly what I wanted, and as the shoot progressed I became more self-assured. I did know what I wanted. I just hadn’t trusted myself until I was in the thick of it. Once you’re there, on the job, you either sink or swim, right? So I swam.

Did I ever really “make it” as a music video director? Depends how you look at it. Is me becoming part of Gorillaz my making it? Is that where my music video career was leading? It’s debatable. I did some decent clips, alright promos for smaller bands, but it was all just me figuring things out, learning as I went. Nothing groundbreaking, but it was a start.

Let’s get to Phoo Action. You and Jamie get the pitch accepted and begin working on it. You’ve mentioned that you both worked in the “Marvel method” with Jamie drawing the page layout and then you coming in to add scripting, just like Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, right?

And that’s how Tank Girl was done before as well.

Yeah, you mentioned Alan Martin.

There was a loose agreement on what the story was. “Loose” meaning flexible, an agreed framework, not a full script. We knew the action, character beats, start, middle, end, jokes. Outlined, not scripted. There was a loose agreement on the story.

Jamie just gets on with it. Jamie’s got ants in his pants. Just fucking starts. No overthinking. Just start. It just has to keep going, and you have to keep up.

This method is really rare for contemporary comics. It’s also pretty controversial, too, because people will endlessly debate who actually created the Marvel Universe. Who wrote it? Who created the characters?

Yeah, we all know Stan’s best creation was Stan, right? I was always really mindful to always give the credit to Jamie in the Silver Jubilee book. The original characters are his creations. There are others I’ve added over the years, through the TV adaptation rabbit hole and others that we created together for Phoo Action after Get the Freebies. We own them all together now. The way that works, this Worthing version of The Marvel Method, is he’d be busy drawing characters and then we’re talking about who they are. Then I’m taking ideas and running with them and going, “What about this? What about this?” Jamie would take what he wanted from that, put it in, start on pages before or while things are being scripted, maybe turning it into something else entirely, or just messing with it for the sake of it. He likes to fuck with things too. It was fluid, reactive, less about precision, more about keeping the momentum going and seeing where it led.

By then, we were really close. Proper good mates. And when you’re creatives, the conversation always turns to ideas. You throw stuff out and one thing leads to another. Half the time, you don’t even realize you’re building something. It just happens. This is exactly how Jamie and Damon came up with Gorillaz just three years later when they were living together. I’d stayed at his house for one whole summer holiday the year before when I was still at art school. He put me up, so I’d always been there while he was working, I was just there when he was hitting deadlines. I knew how he worked. We were always cracking jokes. We understood one another. We just had a shorthand. I don’t think it’s controversial to say that you can tell the Tank Girl stories that Jamie’s taken the lead on and the ones Alan’s taken the lead on. The opening episode of Phoo Action, “Lungs of Buddha,” Jamie had outlined that and he told me what parts he’d wanted me to script and through that process I put some other ideas into it.

Jamie pitched the rest of the story to me too, “This is the start. This is where I want to get to. Let’s join the dots together.” The plan was to then build it episode by episode, month by month, rather than me sitting down and writing a full script for him to draw, like he’d done with Tank Girl: The Odyssey. That just isn’t how Jamie works. When he’s locked into a rigid script, something dies inside him, and on the page.

Instead, the idea was to spend the first two weeks of the month drinking tea, cracking jokes, and throwing ideas around, and then, as the deadline loomed, actually start making the thing. Of course, Jamie would probably start in week one, then by week two, he’d be like, “Mat, have you fucking done anything?” And I’d need to scramble. But we kept it fluid because we wanted to keep the satire sharp, right up to the deadline, so it could stay reactive and contemporary. Even now, someone recently wrote a review of Phoo Action saying they kept forgetting it was set in the future because everything about it felt so tied to the late ’90s culture we were living in.

We still wanted to keep that element of being able to make jokes about whoever was in the cultural spotlight at the time: Liam [Gallagher], Louise Wener, Northern Uproar, Steve Lamacq, Peter Andre, whoever we decided on that month. We’d already planned for one of the villains to be Brian Harvey from East 17, and the gag was that he’d somehow taken his own skull off; he’s low-hanging fruit, to be fair. A lot of Get the Freebies was cruel, even spiteful, if I’m honest.

That was just the attitude in the press back then. This was pre-internet, so what people now call “clap back” on social media, where everyone’s chasing clout, was happening in the music press instead. And Jamie was part of that. It was this weird, drawn-out dialogue between creatives shit-talking each other to see what would come back. But it wasn’t instant. You’d throw something out, put it into the world, and then just wait to see what happened next.

Brian Harvey. Looking back now, as an adult, you see the bigger picture. He’s struggled with mental health issues, clinical depression. But at the time, he’d famously run himself over with his own car and blamed it on eating too many baked potatoes. And we just thought, “That is the best supervillain origin story we’ve ever heard.” It was so ridiculous, so Phoo Action. A pop star turning into a supervillain based on something that had actually happened in real life. It was too good not to use.

That was the kind of thing we were playing with, but at the same time, we wanted it to be an ongoing, proper, collectible graphic novel story. With a single, big story arc, unlike Get the Freebies. We were only doing four or five pages a month, so in total, it would have been what, 60-, 70-odd pages? But even then, when it got cancelled, there were great ideas in it, a complete story outline I wasn’t going to throw away. This – [holds up story outline treatment] – this is the original story treatment.

[Reading treatment] Each episode is 10 pages in length, appearing as five-page monthly installments. The action will be devised and divided to deliver high action, sharp humour, and nifty storytelling throughout every installment. Not forgetting the crowd-pleasing Hewlett big fat knob joke. TMS.

That’s it. That’s our fucking pitch. You know what I mean? The brass balls of it, like, “Oh yeah, we’ve got this one sorted. It’s in the bag.” No you fucking haven’t.

Then there were the chapters: Enter the Flying Scotsman, Banquet of Evil, Up The Middle Path, Opium Zen. That was the original structure. I stuck to that, but I added more chapters along the way. Expanded it, built on it. But that was the backbone I honored writing the prose novel adaptation, twenty five years later.

It was green lit and then canceled under new editorial direction — which happens a lot around this property. Did you ever think it would see print or were you already looking towards live action?

Jamie had also asked me to write the comics because I’d gone to him and said, “I think Get the Freebies should be a feature film.” That was the big plan I’d started piecing together. I’d been on the Tank Girl set back in ’93 or ’94, whatever year it was, and the arrogance — I mean, I was 22, 23 — standing there thinking, “The reason this isn’t working is because the studio just doesn’t get it. We should be making this ourselves.” Without a single clue what that actually meant.

And Jamie was like, “Yeah, let’s do it. Let’s get this adaptation up and running.” From his perspective, it was, “Well, I’ve done it with Tank Girl, why the fuck can’t I do it with this?” But this time, sisters are doing it for themselves. No studios, no execs, no one to mess it up, just us, taking charge.

That was another reason he’d said, “Okay, let’s write this next season of comics together.” It was about cementing us as a team, as the rightful owners of this property. The idea was, “We write the comics, put them out there, and that gets people interested in making the film.” It was a strong pitch. Jamie and I co-writing the book meant we were fully in control.

When it all collapsed, I don’t really know why. Jamie’s manager at the time, Tom Astor, who used to be the publisher of Deadline, was involved, but looking back, I don’t understand why we didn’t go and talk to other comics publishers. We just put everything in Tom’s hands. Jamie was the senior creative partner, and I was coming in with no industry experience or connections, so I didn’t have the knowledge to push for other options.

If that happened to me now, like when I walked away from the Z2 contract on this book, I wouldn’t just sit there going, “Can somebody please help me?” I’d do what I did with the Silver Jubilee: go out, meet publishers, and make it happen myself. I went to the London Book Fair, laid it out: “This is what I want to do. This is what I’ve got.” No waiting around, no hoping someone else would sort it. Just taking control and doing it on my own terms.

But I think, for Jamie, this was never really about getting deeper into comics. He wasn’t looking to expand Get the Freebies into some big, long-running series or a trade monthly. He didn’t want that. He liked the five-page format. Short, sharp, fully in his control. He could pencil it, ink it, color it, co-write it, letter it. It was his, completely.

It’s funny when you look at Tank Girl: The Odyssey. The drawing and inks are beautiful. I love that artwork – but the coloring has this flat, mechanical feel. And it’s not that the colorist did a bad job; they were a good colorist. But it wasn’t him. It wasn’t Jamie putting his full stamp on it, and I think that’s what he wanted to avoid.

There’s a great Cartoonist Kayfabe episode where they go through his Taschen book, and Ed [Piskor] talks about this exact thing, how no colorist would ever make the choices Jamie does. It’s all hand-colored with felt tips, which is just mad when you think about it. The idea that you can start in one corner and work your way down with felt tips and have it come out looking like that is insane. [Holds up a page of Get the Freebies]

So, circling back to the beginning of our conversation. Imagine I wanted to be a comic book artist. I’m looking at this, I’m looking at that, and I’m just thinking, “What the hell?” Yeah . . . maybe I’ll do something else. It’s that whole "comparison is the thief of joy" thing. You see someone operating on a completely different level, and instead of it inspiring you, it just makes you question why you’re even bothering.

There is something about those Deadline artists and their coloring process that seemed really different from the norm of American comics.

Their approach to comics was different. We were influenced by different things. Geographically, we’re closer to Europe, and while we share a lot with the U.S. because of the language, we were more drawn to European cinema, painting, and fine art traditions also. We loved American comics and pop culture, but we were just as into British comics, the European scene, and early manga and anime.

The palette in Akira was massively influential. The way they handled color, otherworldly hues against hyper-saturated neons, felt cinematic, like fine art meets Blade Runner. We were art school kids, so that stuff hit hard. Paris, Texas, for example. The bold colors, the atmosphere. It all fed into how we approached comics. Creative, individual, atmospheric, but still fun and punchy.

Let’s talk a little bit about the live action adaptation. To me, it counts as one more strike against mainstream trying to adapt gonzo. I’ve never seen it done successfully, to get that “One step to the left,” right. I don’t know if you can do it at BBC.

No, you just nailed it. You can do it, but you probably can’t do it on the BBC. They genuinely loved Phoo, they really did. But at the same time, they were the BBC. It was like, “We love your wackiness, but actually, we’re the authority. And no, no, you don’t do it like that.”

So immediately, our hubris, thinking we were the ones calling the shots, was out the window. They kept telling us, “We don’t want it to look like Doctor Who; we want it to be your vision.” But I was going mad, because at the same time, I was reading Ricky Gervais’ scripts for Extras, where his character gets commissioned by the BBC to make When the Whistle Blows, and they just butcher it.

There’s that famous scene where David Bowie sings “Funny Little Fat Man,” completely humiliating him. And I remember thinking, “Oh fuck, is that happening to me? Am I the sellout?” And at the same time, while I’m reading the scripts I’m thinking; but Extras is the BBC, so, “Maybe it’s fine?”

But the thing is, we got commissioned in-house at the BBC. If Nira Park had done it [Edgar Wright’s producer] or if we’d gone with Baby Cow [Steve Coogan’s production company] or if we’d at least had a producer between us and them fighting for our vision, it would have been different. But when push came to shove, the same people who said, “We don’t want it to look like Doctor Who,” went and hired an award-winning Doctor Who director.

And he’s great. I’m always at pains to say that. Not because I’m trying to be diplomatic ...

I don’t think it’s a bad show. I just don’t think it’s Phoo Action.

No. The reason I put the script and the boards in the book is because, while it’s not quite Phoo Action, it’s still more Phoo Action than what actually got made. I wanted people to be able to read it, see the storyboards, and picture something different. Obviously, it’s the 54th draft or whatever, after going over it again and again and again, but at least it gives a sense of what it could have been.

Were you giving up ground in every revision?

Yeah, when the series finally got cancelled, they took me out to dinner and said, “If it’s any consolation, you were right.” And I just said, point blank, “It’s not.”

At that point, the only consolation was that the series hadn’t gone ahead and been even more wrecked. It had taken so long to get made, and it had been such a fight for all the reasons I’ve told you. It took a long time to get to the point where the BBC fucked it. By this point, it’s 2008, a full decade after Jamie and I first agreed to do it, and already eight years after Gorillaz took off.

There’s this old saying, alright, I’m going to quote a knobhead here, I’m going to quote Morrissey: “You Just Haven’t Earned It Yet, Baby.” And honestly, that’s so true in the U.K.

I remember going to the U.S. for the Tank Girl premiere. There was all this excitement around us. An executive from Hanna-Barbera came up and said, “Come and have a meeting, we’d love to hear what ideas you’ve got,” just because I was part of the team. In the U.K, if you turned up to that same party, they’d kick you out. The establishment here didn’t want to hear your ideas.

And it wasn’t like Hanna-Barbera actually wanted to do something good. We were like, “Yeah, if this was ‘70s Hanna-Barbera, maybe we’d be interested.” But it was hard for me to get in anywhere. I’d been pitching Phoo Action for years, pitched it with Rachel Talalay, even had a development deal offered from ITV Studios when they were working with the Red Dwarf production company.

Maybe that would’ve been the right version of it. But honestly, I just don’t think British terrestrial TV at the time could’ve pulled it off. And then when Kick-Ass came out? I was like that Leonardo DiCaprio Once Upon a Time in Hollywood meme, pointing at the screen. We’d already told them: Look at Kung Fu Hustle. Look at the Beastie Boys’ "Body Movin'" and "Intergalactic." We spelled it out. But they just didn’t get it.

It reminds me of Scott Pilgrim vs. The World in a way where it had to be so far removed from the norm to be true to the source material.

There you go. That’s Edgar being able to stay true to himself, calling the shots. But he had Nira backing him, and of course Jess [Stevenson] and Simon [Pegg].

We’re going back again, but I just didn’t have that self-confidence at the time. Who was I to say no? I’d been trying to get this done for so long. Who was I to turn down a BBC deal? Whereas now, after everything, I know that just because a deal is offered doesn’t mean you should take it. That whole experience shaped my mindset when I finally decided, “If I’m going to do this book, it has to be the Phoo Action book I believe in, mine and Jamie’s, or nothing.” Whether that’s good or bad ... that’s up to everyone else.

There’s this old ’80s Swiss dance band, Yello, same era as Kraftwerk, but not as great. Kind of a cross between Sparks and Kraftwerk. Dieter Meyer, one of the members, said something that stuck with me: “When you’re making art, there’s always compromise. You can’t avoid that. But there’s no point compromising your vision to do what other people want, because if it fails, you’ll blame them. And if it works, they’ll take the credit. You have to succeed or fail on your own terms.” And that’s exactly it.

When people ask about Gorillaz, they’ll say, “Did you think it was going to be a big success?” Well, no, we didn’t have a fucking crystal ball. We just thought we were doing the right things.

The last time I saw Damon was ages ago, back when they first got back together and did that big showcase in 2017. I was at the Humanz party after that gig and I bumped into him. He gave me this massive hug and said, “You were part of this, part of the foundation. Can you believe how big it’s become?” And I just said, “This is what we always thought it could be.”

That’s the thing: anything can fail. There’s incredible art just left by the side of the road, dying for one reason or another. With the book, I just did what I believed in. The fact that I was reading Extras at the time of making the pilot with the BBC and doubting what was happening. That should’ve told me something. But I didn’t listen to my gut. I let my head take over. “It’s the BBC. You’ve got a deal. You’re doing a show. You should be happy. You’re in a privileged position. How many people would kill for this?” And so I went along with it.

But really, you can’t just let them fucking take over.

Because it doesn’t fit your material.

And because it was such a personal vision. That’s the mark of stand-out creativity. It has to come from a real place, not be watered down to fit some pre-approved mold. And our material’s fucking edgy. It was always meant to be. That’s what made it Phoo Action. You take that edge away, you smooth it out to make it more palatable, and suddenly, it’s just not the thing anymore. It loses its teeth.

In the book, you have character designs that really change from the early material. You have Get the Freebies which is almost pure gonzo, but then the actual TV series vision is way darker than how the pilot turned out with the character designs more apocalyptic and dystopian. You have these really creepy, horrific characters too. In looking at the designs and looking at the TV show, they couldn’t be more different. What did you imagine the TV show to be like?

The TV series was leaning more into the Li Long Chang story, the antagonist we’d created for the cancelled Phoo Action comics. When you look at the prose story, which retells that arc, I feel like I’ve synthesized all of that. Even though I’m taking the story from ’97, I’m also bringing in that vision for what was meant to be the TV series.

At its core, it was a buddy cop comedy-drama, but with an ancient Chinese demon as the villain. Jamie and I were both massive horror heads, so we wanted to make this dark, comedic, still stupid, still Phoo series, but with that proper comedy-horror edge. Like Return of the Living Dead, “Tina! But I don’t care Darlin’, because I love you, and you’ve got to let me EAT YOUR BRAAAAAAAAAAAIIIIIIIIIIIINS!” We had those kinds of references baked in. In the pitch deck, we had pictures from Basket Case, and Jamie and I were both huge Mike Mignola fans, so that was another touchstone.

It was darker. The BBC had got scared by how cartoonish the Freebies were in the pilot. But the thing is, we purposely made them look like costumes. We wanted it to feel like the “Body Movin’” video by the Beastie Boys. We wanted that to be the joke. That you know there’s people in there and that’s funny. A bit shit, like League of Gentlemen, [The Mighty] Boosh, that kind of low-fi, knowingly ridiculous aesthetic.

But the BBC wanted it to be more serious. The concept art for the series also just followed where Jamie’s work was going at the time. If you look at the costume designs he did for Journey to the West, it’s right in line with that. The realization of that ended up more poppy, so who knows where it would’ve landed in the end on the series. We’ll never know.

I remember arguing with the producer. He was adamant you couldn’t do horror on TV, that even though HBO was making big, ongoing crime dramas, the BBC couldn’t do that kind of storytelling. And then, of course, they replaced Phoo with a show about ghosts, werewolves, and vampires – and that same producer went on to commission Peaky Blinders. Make of that what you will. The irony is, we’d actually hired a lead director who’d made a cult zombie movie, Outpost, about Nazi zombies, and his cinematographer was using Natural Born Killers as a reference. So there was hope. But at the same time, there was tons of BBC fuckery going on. So, who knows?

Back to the book. This has a whole new prose novel part of it. What were some challenges from adapting a story from one medium to another?

Well, it’s not just switching from one medium to another, it’s switching back to my 26-year-old brain. That was the first big question: “Can I legitimately do this?” In 2025, can a middle-aged white man legitimately write a story with an 18-year-old party-head junkie female lead and an Asian gay man, but who’s also a bit of a stereotype? Because Jamie does this thing where he creates characters that have some stereotypical traits and then flips them, but there’s definitely some late ’90s cultural bias and blindness in there with Terry.

So that was the first challenge. Can I find this voice again? But also, do I even want to? Plus, remember, I used to fuck with things just for the sake of it. I don’t want to be that same idiot writing without awareness, like I did for Penthouse. Another thing. In the interim, I actually trained as a sex coach, so I’m really aware now of all the unconscious attitudes towards sexuality flying around in the original material. That was another big thing for me. I wanted to reframe it, to make good on it, but without being heavy-handed. It still had to feel true to the characters and the property. I wasn’t interested in sanitizing it or turning it into something it wasn’t, but I was interested in making sure it wasn’t just replicating old biases without thinking. So I sat down and went back to the comics, with the prose novel and our old story treatment in mind, asking myself, “What do I actually want to resolve from this world?” What got left on the cutting room floor? The dynamics, the relationships, what was pushed aside while Jamie was barreling forward with three or four pages a month of satirical cartooning mayhem?

And then there’s this thing, just in the first episode of Get the Freebies, he’s got Terry putting Whitey on hormone retardants. She’s 16, and he’s drugging her with hormone blockers. And I thought, “Right, if I’m doing this book, I have to tackle that head-on.” Because, to use the word of the day, it’s problematic.

And then there’s the bigger ideas: The Freebies coming back, dying, being reborn. And there are other threads too. Terry’s homosexuality, for example, is handled in this really deft way in the comics. There are these beautiful, quiet moments like Whitey going out for the night, and Terry’s just staying in with his flatulent boyfriend. It’s never a thing. It’s not played solely for laughs or shock, it just is, and it feels domestic and real. Jamie was so good at that.

But I wanted to build on it. What does that actually mean? Terry is an openly gay hero in London. What does that mean? And he’s Asian. We say Giles is his boyfriend, but we know fuck all about him. And Whitey’s boyfriend? He’s literally in one panel in the first episode, never named. You only know it’s her boyfriend because she’s in bed with him, skinning up with a blue Ben Grimm. And so I was just like, “Oh. Okay, I need to look at that.”

That’s what was so great about it. If you look at how Jamie handles interiority in the comics, it’s all visual: no exposition, just expression. Like, look at this panel. [Holds up Phoo Action page]

You see Whitey looking through the Phoomobile window. There’s no dialogue, but what the fuck is going on in her head? She looks wrecked. She’s a kid, but she’s a pop star, a celebrity crime fighter, a superhero in a world where she’s also a junkie and an orphan. And everyone’s excited to see her because she’s all over the kids’ magazines and the tabloids. So I had to ask, what is that world?

I wrote the prose novel in three months because I wanted to work in the same style as we wrote the comics. God, am I going to sound like a pompous idiot. ... Anyway, one of Jack Kerouac’s maxims was “First thought, best thought.” Just write it down. Everyone talks about the first draft being a vomit draft, and yeah, you come back and edit, but the key is to get it out, to keep pushing forward. Like we would’ve done back in Jamie’s home studio in Worthing.

And it had already taken a year just to do the deal on the book, leaving me three months to write and design the whole thing under the original Z2 deadline. So I just wrote — start to finish, no looking back. Honoring that gonzo style we’ve been talking about.

Once I finished a first pass chapter, I’d send it straight to my story editors, James Harvey, a British comic book artist, and his partner Penelope Root. Then I’d dive into the next chapter while they did an editorial pass. They’d send it back, and my first reaction was always, “What the fuck have you done to my writing?” Then we’d get on a Discord call, argue it out. The first time they sent me edits, I just changed it all back and sent it straight back to them. But then I realized this isn’t going to work. We didn’t have the time for endless back-and-forths.

That’s when James sent me this Cinderella gif of two fairy godmothers zapping each other. It cracked me up. And that’s when I knew I’d found the right collaborative partners.

So we got on a call and had a proper editorial, story discussion. And by this point in my career, I’d worked my way up in the film industry, and had all the ups and downs we’ve discussed. After being a music video director and messing around with that, then being in Gorillaz and on to the BBC fiasco. That said, one of the best things about working at the BBC was that I basically got a three-year internship in development. I was around people who were working on scripts day in, day out on daily TV shows. So I got schooled. I knew what development was. After that I’d been working in film finance, development, and production for a decade. I had learned what works and what doesn’t work and I don’t have to think about it or second guess myself too much.

So, this a long way to say; I’d been in story development meetings a lot. I wasn’t coming into this book thinking, “It’s mine, it’s my words, no one touches it.” But as you can probably tell, I’m also pretty clear about what I will and won’t let pass. I’ve been doing this long enough to know I’m not going to just roll over and say, “Well, if you say so.” I know where that ends.

At the same time, I know the best thing you can do is work with other brilliant creatives, people who want to make you look good. That’s how Pixar works, right? And looking back now, I realize Jamie was doing this with me when I was first hired to work on the original story with him and then later, on Gorillaz. He probably didn’t even realize that’s what he was doing, but that’s exactly what it was. Bringing me in because he knew how to get the best out of me.

For the prose novel, when you’re working with Philip, how did the process go? Were you doing rough layouts? Was he just given the whole script and chose what he wanted to do?

I wrote the novel first. I didn’t want to ask Philip to draw something and then realize later I had to change an important detail or scrap something completely. Even though I said I was writing it straight through, no looking back, I still gave myself that safety clause just in case there was some massive plot hole in my outline that meant I had to go back and rewrite something in the setup. That didn’t happen, I hasten to add. But I didn’t want him drawing something for “Enter the Flying Scotsman” only for me to reach “Two Become One” and go, “Oh fuck, I need to inject this earlier, and now it’s already drawn.”

So I waited until I’d finished writing, then had a chat with Philip via email. I asked him, “Do you just want to read it and choose what you want to draw? Or do you want me to tell you what to draw?” And Philip, being Philip, was like, “Oh, I don’t mind.”

What I ended up doing was, per chapter, giving him a selection of things he could illustrate. I pulled out visual references, so he had the text, plus more specifics for whatever part he was illustrating, and I wrote up a proper brief for each one: what people were wearing, who they were, the set and setting. And he wanted that too. I think he was really nervous because he was —

— stepping into Jamie’s shoes.

You’ve got to remember, even though he worked on Get the Freebies, he’s not credited. So it was really important to bring him into the limelight here because he did a lot on that.

At the same time, by the point I’m talking to him about it, he’s dropping in cold. But I’ve now re-lettered all the comics, I have written the chapter intros, I’m retouching artwork, I’ve written a 70,000-word prose novel. I’m deep in it. And he’s just like, “I’m not quite sure.” Which is fair enough. Jamie had asked for references of all the characters too for the big double page spread and cover he did for the book. It’s stuff neither of them have thought about for 25 years.

So he’s asking me, “If you want them wearing anything specific, just tell me. Show me.” And yeah, I was really specific. I’m not comparing myself to Alan Moore — I’m not — but I know he writes very detailed action descriptions for his artists. And I get that, because I’m a visual artist too. I come from film. I know what I’m thinking of. I visualize what I’m writing. I’d written the book with a really clear sense of the world, and even though it’s silly, it’s also very precise. Very time and place specific to a mid-'00s London. So that’s how I wanted to help Philip, making sure everything was in alignment between text and image with enough room for him to do his magic. And he did!

Three months seems crazy to write a novel.

Well, it seems to be a recurring theme. The last thing I did on Gorillaz was a show called Charts of Darkness, which I wrote, directed, and edited, and it aired within three months. Cass Browne, who I co-wrote Charts of Darkness with and who later took over writing for Gorillaz, actually wrote Rise of the Ogre in three months as well.

I haven’t looked into it, but there’s got to be something about that timeframe. Like rock stars dying at 27, or the William Burroughs/Illuminatus! trilogy 23 enigma, or The Hitchhiker’s Guide [to the Galaxy] answer to “the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything” is 42. Shit like that.

Obviously, I already had the story outline. When I say I wrote it in three months, I mean the prose. I spent maybe another month before that going over what we had, looking at what was missing, what was problematic, what worked and what was weak and fixing the things we always knew needed attention.

There are whole chapters in there now that are completely mine, bridging gaps, adding new layers. There’s one that’s a pastiche of Speed, the Keanu Reeves and Sandra Bullock film, because that’s a very Worthing School of Comics, Big Underwear thing to do, throw in a film pastiche.

The Freebies weren’t originally part of this story either, but they’re just too iconic. I wanted to make sense of who they are and make them whole. And, like I’ve said, Terry and Whitey’s dynamic ... it’s dodgy as fuck in Get the Freebies. As well as their lovers, friends, accomplices. That all needed unpacking. Same with some of the other throwaway villains. It was all begging to be done properly, to actually do justice to what was there, the insanity of it all.

I want to talk about superheroes briefly. Whitey feels the most “super” character with the magical utility pants, but she’d be inconceivable in Marvel or DC. There’s just no way Whitey can exist there. Elanor and Bill stand in the superhero genre as well, but Whitey is our main character. How does a superhero fit in the British underground comic scene of the late '90s? Is Whitey the Britpop Wonder Woman?

Well, Whitey and Terry are both superheroes. Terry’s a street-level hero, like Iron Fist or Luke Cage. But in the UK, we’re naturally skeptical about supes. Superheroes are preposterous. They quite literally wouldn’t fly here. That’s why we’re always deconstructing them.

There’s that whole American tradition: big, vaudevillian, camp, larger than life. It works, but until I went to the States, I didn’t get it. I loved it, thought it was amazing, but it was the total antithesis of the small, grey reality we were still living in. We were still paying off World War II. I mean, it was brown. Everything was brown over here.

I remember going to the States for the Tank Girl shoot in the early ’90s, driving to set in this massive Ford Falcon, Guns N’ Roses on the radio. And I hated Guns N’ Roses. But there I was, middle of LA, and suddenly I went, “Oh yeah, I get it.” We also nearly got gang-banged in Compton in that car, but that’s another story.

Anyway, back to your question. Whitey actually has Captain America’s shield in the first couple of episodes of Get the Freebies. I don’t know if you clocked that in the comics. We even reference it in the prose. She had to give it back because Steve Rogers put a copyright suit against her. We said, “Steve Rogers, the miserable old git,” or something like that.

And yeah, she’s a superhero, but I’m glad you mentioned Elanor and Bill too, because they were a gift, proper uncut gems in Phoo Action to explore the superheroic element in a way that felt true to this world alongside Terry and Whitey themselves.

But there’s some wider context here too. Are you familiar with the Comics Unmasked exhibition from 2014?

I know Dave McKean was in that show.

Yeah, this goes back to the whole British Invasion thing we talked about earlier. Comics Unmasked: Art and Anarchy in the UK was this exhibition at the British Library in 2014, curated by Paul Gravett and John Harris Dunning. It explored the history and impact of British comics, how they’ve always pushed boundaries in politics, social issues, sexuality, and counterculture. Proper fuck you energy.

It covered everything. From mainstream stuff to underground and indie comics, with a focus on rebellion, protest, and subversion. You had Judge Dredd and V for Vendetta, as well as the Oz indecency trials, along with heavyweights like Alan Moore, Posy Simmonds, and, of course, our own Mr. Jamie Hewlett.

There was also a companion book, with a cover by Jamie, that dug into all of this. How British comics have always been a bit feral, shaping public consciousness by taking the piss out of authority rather than worshipping it. And Jamie’s cover is perfect. It’s got that classic irreverence with this masked female figure swigging from a hip flask, knuckle dusters on, looking like she could be either a punk cosplayer or an actual superhero.

It’s so him, that mix of rebellion, punk attitude, and self-aware humor. And it really sums up the difference between British and American comics. Over here, comics have always leaned into the subversive, the sardonic. In the U.S., superheroes are these big, earnest, idealistic figures. In the U.K.? We take the piss.

And then you’ve got the defeated Captain America-style superhero lying in the alley behind her, a proper jab at those cultural differences. American comics are all about larger-than-life heroes, clean moral lines, good vs evil. British comics? We mock authority, pull it apart, play in the grey areas.

Jamie’s work has always done that. Tank Girl, Get the Freebies, Gorillaz. It’s all about characters who reject conformity, embrace mayhem, and do it with a knowing wink.

So, long way of saying Get the Freebies is a very British take on the superhero and street-level action hero archetype. It takes elements of American comics but twists them with that classic British irreverence and satire. Whitey Action, as a superhero sidekick, is anything but. She’s not some devoted, obedient second-in-command. She’s unpredictable, chaotic, totally subverts the dynamic. It’s her story.

Her whole vibe – brash, anti-authoritarian, punk and rave as fuck – comes straight from British counterculture. She’s less a traditional ally, more a rebellious co-conspirator, ready to tear it all down and have a laugh while doing it.

However, while Terry sees himself as a protector of the people, he’s a very British kind of hero, again, more piss-taking and self-aware than his American counterparts. His world is totally absurd, blending action with satire and an irreverent take on authority but run through with a really pure, naive innocence you can’t help love him for.

He also flips the Western stereotype of the Hong Kong action hero. Instead of the stoic, hyper-competent martial artist, like Bruce Lee’s Kato, Terry’s got this bumbling, Clouseau-esque charm. He’s a skilled fighter, sure, but there’s an absurdity to him that undercuts the usual infallible action hero trope. And then there’s the fact he’s openly gay, completely breaking from the hyper-masculine image that martial arts icons are usually boxed into. Instead of the silent, disciplined enforcer, he’s a mix of confidence and comic ineptitude, which sits perfectly in that British comics tradition of subverting expectations.

That balance of homage and parody runs through all of Phoo Action. The 2000 AD mindset of anti-heroes, satire, and tearing down power structures. Unlike traditional American superheroes, which tend to deal in clear moral lines, British comics lean into grey areas, balancing taking the piss while still delivering the action.

And yeah, Terry and Whitey’s dynamic isn’t just about comics. It’s very Hong Kong Phooey and Spot, the Cat too. The supposed hero stumbles through situations while the “sidekick” is actually the brains of the operation. That whole American animated comedy tradition — the clueless, overconfident protagonist and the smarter, more capable sidekick — is a massive influence. But with Phoo Action, I wanted to take that formula and run it through a British underground comics and punk filter, injecting it with that raw, scrappy, fast-and-loose energy.

And the hyper-referentiality of Jamie’s work.

Yeah, so when we were developing the BBC Phoo Action pilot, it was meant to sit at this weird crossroads between homage and piss-take. We were pulling from those ‘60s and ‘70s American superhero TV shows like Batman ‘66, The Incredible Hulk, but also from those Hong Kong imports that had a huge impact on British telly back when Jamie and I were growing up, like Monkey and The Water Margin. The idea was to nod to all of that while ripping it apart through that irreverent British lens, because that’s what we do. Pastiche, parody, bit of a love letter, bit of a piss-take.

Those American superhero shows had very different approaches. Batman ‘66 was pure camp, totally self-aware, whereas The Incredible Hulk was played straight, super-serious, full of tortured emotion. Phoo Action messed with both of those ideas. It borrowed the garish aesthetics and episodic nature of those old shows but undercutting the sincerity, reveling in the ridiculousness of it all.

At the same time, it owed just as much to those Hong Kong martial arts series that hit the U.K. in the ‘70s and ‘80s. Monkey and The Water Margin had this wild mix of philosophical rambling, over-the-top action, and pure theatrical melodrama, totally different to anything on British TV at the time. Phoo Action played into that energy, throwing in martial arts spectacle but with a proper tongue-in-cheek British attitude. It was both a love letter to that stuff and a complete send-up of how ridiculous it could be. I’m not sure everyone involved got the memo though.

Considering the general English skepticism of both high and low culture, as you’re saying, Whitey seems as close as you’re allowed to get to superheroes under that skepticism.

I don’t know if you clocked this, but in the second season of the comics, Jamie was drawing Whitey in superhero prints. Ben Grimm shirts, Spider-Man, all very Marvel. Proper pop-art approach, where superheroes and supervillains do exist in this world, but we’re basically saying, “Isn’t that fucking stupid?”

I was listening to an interview with Jamie the other day, and he was talking about how much Mad Magazine influenced him. There’s this story he tells: his older brother, who’s actually a film exec now, bought a copy of Mad that was satirizing Star Wars. Jamie was a little kid, massive Star Wars fan, and was furious that they were taking the piss out of something he loved. But then he couldn’t resist. It was his brother’s comic, so he secretly read it and ended up howling with laughter. Just completely flipped his head around.

The first time he talked about Mad being a big influence, that I remember, was in Charts of Darkness.

Yeah, he says Mort Drucker, Jack Davis, all the artists.

I was like, really? Because at the time, I thought Jamie’s influences were all British underground comics and European artists. It was only when I was writing the book that I looked at that interview again and went, “Fuck me. Get the Freebies and Phoo Action is basically Mad Magazine meets Looney Tunes, but as a superhero story.”

And that makes total sense, because Mad was all about taking the piss out of pop culture, and Looney Tunes had this completely unhinged, anything-goes energy, both of which Phoo Action thrives on. But then you throw in that Jaime Hernandez influence too. It’s like if Hopey was a superhero, except she’s dropped into the drug-fueled late ’90s, she’s a teenage superstar, and she completely goes off the fucking rails.

Peter Parker doesn’t go off the rails. He doesn’t start doing coke. But Whitey does because that’s what would happen. That’s what did happen. We were in this comic book scene, we moved to London, and suddenly our mates were pop stars. And what happens when you’re running around with pop stars in the late ’90s? There’s a lot of cocaine. But Whitey’s 16. So it’s even worse. She’s in the middle of all of it.

And that’s what makes her so different from your standard superhero character. She’s not some aspirational, morally upright, save-the-day figure. She’s messy, reckless, and completely at the mercy of her own fame. That’s what Phoo Action gets right. It’s not just a parody of superheroes, it’s a reflection of what that kind of status actually does to people, especially when they’re too young to handle it.

That’s reflective of the young female pop star at the time. Britney Spears, etc. You have all this hypersexualization of Disney stars and Whitey fits into that.

Yeah, it’s a serious critique of that. You asked me about the difference between writing the prose and the comics, that’s a big part of it. Going into her interiority, asking, “Okay, what does it mean for her to be 18 now?” And she’s been famous since she was 16. Younger. And she’s a superhero sidekick? And a junkie? And the press are writing about her sexuality? But she’s a child and they’re treating her like some tabloid train wreck. And then you’ve got people speculating that she’s in some inappropriate scenario with Terry or her relationship with Bill, when in reality, he’s just this big blue rock of a mate who’s actually looking out for her.

You look at what happened with all those famous young women from the period, chewed up and spat out by the press. Hypersexualized as teens, torn down the second they showed any cracks. And it’s not like that’s gone away, it’s just mutated into a different beast with social media. It’s that hypocrisy: build them up, tear them down. That’s what the British press does. Like I said, Whitey’s not just a superhero, she’s famous, which is a super power in itself, and that’s more dangerous to her than any villain she fights. So yeah, the book really digs into that. What it actually means to be a teenage girl in the public eye, where your whole life is up for grabs and everyone thinks they own a piece of you. Yes, she’s a superhero. But it’s not, “With great power comes great responsibility.” It’s more power, more problems, y’know?

I’ve actually written two different origin stories for Whitey’s utility pants, the source of her superpowers. Jamie didn’t care. He’s pure Looney Tunes logic. “It’s like this because it is.” When I went into the BBC, they kept asking, “But why is it like that?” And I’d say, “Because it is. Because it’s funny.” And they’d go, “But why?” And suddenly I had to change it up.

Why can she pull things out of her pants? Because she can … It’s like this to me. Why can the blind Daredevil fight? Why can Spider-Man climb walls? “Oh, he got bitten by a radioactive spider.” That’s supposed to be an explanation? This is why we had Brian Harvey as supervillain who ate too many baked potatoes, got run over by his own car, and it unlocked the powers of his mind. Because it’s fucking stupid.

You get exposed to too much radiation, you die. You don’t become some all-knowing being. Your skin gets burnt off. It’s America making excuses. What happened in Hiroshima and Nagasaki? They didn’t create a race of superhumans. You don’t get Steve Rogers or The Hulk out of that, for fuck’s sake. And I’m not comparing myself to Alan Moore, [Laughs] but that’s what he tackled with Dr. Manhattan in some ways. The trope. That’s culture-defining stuff. My influence is different. Alan’s older. We came up through punk and rave, through clubbing. Our reference points are different.

For us, it’s the Hernandez brothers. That’s the kind of storytelling I love. Grounded. Funny but human. Love and Rockets had superheroes too, but we wanted to push that further. Do it through satire. That’s what Elanor’s all about. She injected plutonium into her face to get superpowers and just ended up disfigured in the initial run of comics. I deal with all of this in the prose, that idea of Elanor’s longing to be super, just like her best friend, and then putting these superhero tropes under the microscope while we’re at it.

And Terry’s homosexuality too. There’s always been a level of homoeroticism in martial arts, whether people want to acknowledge it or not. Bruce Lee was a martial arts icon, but he was also a cha-cha champion, he’s pretty camp and that doesn’t undermine him as an icon of screen action and the fighting arts.

All that shirtless fighting…

Yeah, and superheroes. Come on, they’ve always been a bit much, haven’t they? All the rippling muscles, the slow-motion grappling, the breathless “We’re not so different, you and I” monologues. It’s been coded for decades, but Terry? He’s got nothing to code. He’s not playing the subtext game, he’s not winking at the audience. He’s just out. His sexuality isn’t a secret, it isn’t a plot twist, it’s just part of who he is, as normal and unremarkable to him as his martial arts skills or his morning meditation routine. He doesn’t need to declare anything because he was never hiding in the first place.

Being out almost 30 years ago is quite a bit different than today. What was it like thinking through his sexuality this many years later considering the change in politics surrounding sexual identity?

Right, and you’ve got to remember, this was 1996. Terry was out and in a committed relationship with Giles at a time when the British government was still debating whether queer people should even have the right to exist in mainstream culture. Section 28 was still in effect, banning the “promotion” of homosexuality in schools. The age of consent for gay men was still higher than for straight people. Civil partnerships weren’t even a thing. And here’s Terry, front and center in a crime-fighting, kung-fu, batshit cop saga just living his life, loving his partner, and kicking arse. No tragic coming-out arc, no tortured secrecy, no shame. And it’s hardly like that fight’s over.

That was important to me. Like I said, it wasn’t a thing. It just was. Because that’s how it should be. And then there’s the added layer that Terry is Buddhist, right? Buddhism doesn’t have the notion of original sin, no concept of people being born wrong or needing to repent for who they are. The idea that sexuality is something to be ashamed of just doesn’t factor in. So his sexuality is treated with that same level of normality. It’s not questioned, it’s not framed as some moral dilemma. He loves Giles, he fights crime, and he meditates naked in the morning. Simple as that.

And Whitey. Well, Whitey’s different. Whitey’s superpower is she pulls things out of her Utility Pants. Again, simple as that. Whitey’s smart. Almost too smart. But she’s not some World’s Greatest Detective type. She’s not out here solving intricate mysteries. She’s more like a savant in a sea of morons. She just sees things faster than everyone else, processes it all in this hyperactive, instinctive way. But because she’s surrounded by idiots, half the time she’s just rolling her eyes and waiting for everyone else to catch up.

But yeah, those Utility Pants. I’ve written two different origin stories for them now. In the pilot, it was “Buddha’s loincloth,” which looking back, was a bit shit. It made sense for the direction they wanted the show to go, with this whole “Chosen One” narrative. But that was never ours. That got put on me. And I knew I didn’t want to go anywhere near that in the book.

It was way more fun to lean into pop culture instead, make that the origin. Do you know Sport Billy?

I do not.

Sport Billy. So, there were things Jamie was doing instinctively back then, just pulling in pop culture references, like taking The Italian Job and turning it into The Australian Job. That kind of thing. But coming back to it now, as an older writer, I’m doing it knowingly. Where do I pull from old culture? Where do I pull from pop culture? How do I weave that into the story?

Sport Billy was this cartoon from the late ‘70s, early ‘80s. It was about a kid with a sports bag that was like the TARDIS—tiny on the outside, infinite on the inside. He could pull anything out of it. So in the book, I had Sport Billy fall on hard times after his child star days, washed up, selling PCP. And the vintage material from his bag? It gets repurposed into Whitey’s utility pants. The very weave of her pants is the stuff of vintage upcycling legend.

I love that. It’s a way better origin. Jamie actually mentioned Sport Billy as a reference for the pants in the very first episode of Get the Freebies, so it only made sense to properly lean into it. If that’s where the idea started, why not take it all the way?

This was one of the big things I wanted to do. Go back, find all those little breadcrumbs Jamie had sprinkled throughout Get the Freebies, and actually follow the threads. Pull them together, weave them into something bigger. Like, if Jamie’s original comics were leaving behind all these weird little story seeds, I wanted to go back, plant them properly, water them, and see what kind of ridiculous mutant tree they’d grow into.

I want to ask you about Buddhism too, because Buddhism is all throughout the novel. Buddha’s loincloth, as you were just saying, and a lot more. Your interest dates back to Planet Swerve with references in there, but Buddhism is treated pretty fairly, I would say, with its afterlife. And it’s very important to the story with the Freebies. What interests you in Buddhism and how do you reconcile that with gonzo wackiness?

So yeah, Buddhism is all over the novel, but that was already baked into Get the Freebies. Jamie had already taken the characters to heaven and made Christian God a literal character. We’d already established that Terry, after meeting God, went back to Tibet to train with his masters because his faith had been shaken. Meanwhile, Whitey’s just like, “I met Jesus and I still don’t fucking believe in him.” That’s her. Terry, on the other hand, is asking himself, “What does it mean to be a Buddhist in a world where I’ve literally saved the Garden of Eden?”

Terry’s always been Buddhist. I’d already written a Buddhist myth into “Lungs of Buddha,” this idea of Li Long Chang as an ancient adversary of the Buddha, which is just me bastardizing Mara, the demon of delusion. That’s where my own interest in Buddhism comes in. I said earlier, I took a lot of acid. When you do, you blow open the doors of perception and start asking, “What the fuck is being human?” I’ve always been fascinated by theology and philosophy. Even as a kid, I was poring over books about the supernatural that I inherited from my dad. [Holds up The Supernatural, published by Danbury Books, 1975.]

I’ve studied comparative religion for years, read the Upanishads, the Quran, was brought up in the Church of England, but it was Buddhism that stuck. And yeah, part of that was the Beats, reading Ginsberg. And the thing is, Ginsberg’s Tibetan master, Chögyam Trungpa, was a notorious drunk and prankster. Full-on rock star guru energy. He’d be smoking, drinking, shagging, but at the same time, his teachings were profound. He founded the first Buddhist university in America. The guy was a chaos agent, but also a serious teacher. Ginsberg, William Burroughs, all these counterculture figures gravitated toward him because he was embodying something they were already playing with, the idea that enlightenment and rebellion could coexist. And that’s part of what made Buddhism feel so different from the strict moralism of Western religion. It wasn’t about sin or guilt, being gay isn’t a sin, having sex isn’t a sin! It was about perception, about seeing through illusion. Trungpa was out there mocking the whole idea of spiritual self-seriousness.

And in a way, that fits Phoo Action perfectly. Buddhism in this story isn’t some serene, enlightened mysticism. It’s messy, irreverent, but still deeply meaningful. But the person who really made it all click for me was Joseph Campbell. He framed it as these are just different cultural versions of the same story. Of course, there’s controversy around that, but it made sense to me. Then I found Jack Kornfield, who studied with Ajahn Chah, a Thai meditation teacher who specifically trained foreign disciples so they could bring the teachings back and adapt them to their own cultures. Same thing happened in yoga. Krishnamacharya taught his disciples different methods suited to them. B.K.S. Iyengar, Pattabhi Jois, Indra Devi all took different strands of the practice out into the world. And Indra Devi, by the way, was the one tasked with bringing yoga to the West. She taught Marilyn Monroe. Amazing figure, but barely remembered. Classic example of how history sidelines women.

Anyway, Kornfield has this line: “You’ve got to take the one seat.” Doesn’t matter which fucking seat, just sit in it. He didn’t swear, that’s me. But that really stuck with me. And I’m literally sitting on a meditation cushion while I’m telling you this. Because for me, it was about sticking with Buddhism, studying it first intellectually for a decade, then realizing it’s not an intellectual practice. It’s embodied. I’ve had a meditation practice for 20 years now. That’s how you understand it. How you understand life. By living it. By engaging with it.

So when it came to writing Phoo, it was really important to me that the Buddhist elements were authentic, even though it’s not my Buddhism. Terry’s a Vajrayana Buddhist, trained in a Tibetan monastery, so his practice is full of ritual and tantric deities. It’s a different school, but I needed to get it right. At the same time, I was aware of the tradition of injecting pop culture with these ideas. Alan Moore does it with Gnosticism and magic because that’s his seat. And no, I’m not saying I’m Alan Moore, but that’s the way British comics have always worked.

It was also about treating Whitey’s pain seriously. Her trauma. Yeah, I’m layering it in with joke after joke, but I’m never not considering her as a real person. That’s the balance I always want to keep. You can be completely ridiculous, totally gonzo, but if the audience doesn’t care about the characters, none of it matters. Writing Whitey, I really had to feel into her pain. Not just observe it, but sit with it, meet her where she is. That’s the Buddhist practice of metta, loving-kindness, compassion. Not trying to fix, not judging, just being with. And with Whitey, that meant holding space for all of it. Her anger, her recklessness, her grief, her brilliance. She’s been failed in so many ways, but she’s still her. I had to approach her with patience, let her show me who she was, and write from there and let her truth unfold.

You lived in Malaysia when you were working on Dimensions. Were you putting any of that experience in there?

Well, I actually got hired on Dimensions the month after Phoo Action got cancelled. Perfect timing. It meant I got to get the hell out of the UK after Phoo had spectacularly crashed and burned and throw myself into making a comic book-inspired piece of fun, action fiction based on myths and legends. I was all over that.

It was with Tinge Krishnan, a BAFTA winning British director. She’s a British national, but her dad’s Malaysian and her mum’s Thai. She got this job when Malaysia’s 4G network was launching, and they wanted a series made for streaming on those devices. She wanted it to be comic book-style but rooted in Malaysian myths and legends. And their mythology is wild. They’ve got a boogeyman called the Oily Man. They’ve got levitating vampires. I had to fully immerse myself in all of it, take their gods, their monsters, and turn them into superheroes and supervillains.

I wouldn’t say Dimensions fed back into my other work, but there’s definitely a throughline. After we finished writing and shooting, I got on a little twin-prop plane, flew to Thailand, hiked up a mountain, and spent three weeks on a silent meditation retreat. I’m this weird clash of being a working-class British bloke who grew up through punk, hip-hop, and rave, but at the same time, I’m a self-taught spiritual practitioner, the same way Grant Morrison and Alan are self-taught mystics, I suppose. I looked at Crowley, looked at all those magicians, and it was too convoluted for me. The Thai Forest Tradition clicked because it’s so direct.

It was designed for non-literate agricultural communities, and Buddhist monastics can’t own anything. They literally depend on the laity to feed them, so if they’re not actually helping people, they starve. There’s no megachurch, no tax-free empire, no bullshit. Just do the practice, or don’t eat. I loved that. It cuts through all the noise. That’s what I was looking for. The Forest Tradition was pretty revolutionary at its outset too. Rocked a few boats.

The Bible is just riddles. Now, looking back at it, after years of practice and study, I feel like I get what they were talking about. Not in some Sunday School way, but in the way that all these ancient texts are actually speaking in metaphor, in parable, in symbolism. But people take them literally, and that’s where things go off the rails.

It’s the same with Buddhism. The teachings of the Thai Forest Tradition are so direct: no fluff, no need for elaborate interpretation. Just sit, observe, understand. That’s why it resonated with me. But then you’ve got Vajrayāna Buddhism, the tradition Terry comes out of, which is the opposite. It’s layered in rites, rituals, visualizations, deities, cosmic mandalas. It’s a totally different mode of understanding. One’s a stripped-down, no-nonsense approach to reality, the other’s full immersion in mythic, symbolic practice.

And that’s what made it so much fun to write Terry. Because at the end of the day, superheroes are supernatural. They’re pop culture’s version of gods and demons. They exist in the same symbolic realm. It’s why superheroes work, why people believe in them. It’s myth, but instead of being passed down through scripture, it’s in comics, movies, and cartoons.

The way I see it, the problem isn’t mythology, it’s misreading mythology. If you take any of these stories, Buddhist, Christian, whatever, and insist they’re literal, you’re completely missing the point. It’s like reading The Matrix and thinking it’s just about a guy dodging bullets. But look at the structure, Neo’s just a modern take on a mythic archetype, like Christ or the Buddha.

These stories are about transformation, about the inner journey. About our small, scared, confused selves dying and us awakening to a clear understanding of life. But people read the Bible, and instead of seeing it as a collection of allegories, they go, “No, this is exactly what happened, word for word.” It’s like watching Star Wars and thinking there really was a galaxy far, far away where space wizards fought with laser swords. You’re missing the message. It’s the hero’s journey. Campbell.

Superheroes are the same. They’re myths that we pretend we don’t take seriously, but look at how people react to them. People argue about superhero canon like it’s scripture. Would Batman kill? What’s the “real” Superman? They’re literally fighting over theology. That’s why Whitey and Terry work so well for me. Why I love them. They take that whole framework, but we push it into satire, into absurdism and pop culture, into something that questions the myth even as it plays with it.

I want to ask about Li Long Chang. Visually, he’s modeled after the Fu Manchu stereotype. Did you feel the need to respond to or comment on the stereotype? He’s not quite parodied in the novel as he’s just this really evil character.

So I was like, “Okay, is this contentious? Is it an issue having a Chinese villain?” And I’m thinking, “Well, I’ve also got a Chinese hero.” I’m not saying China is the great evil here. Li Long Chang is comedic because Phoo Action has a comedic tone, but he happens to be a demon that comes out of China. Now, is that just a form he’s taking? An echo of his old human form? Because if you look at him, he’s actually designed to resemble Ming dynasty theatrical characters; that’s what his human form is based on. So, already he’s a theatrical facade. And once he goes full demon, he’s something entirely new. He’s more of a horror character than anything else at that point.

I wasn’t sitting there thinking, “Oh, I need to deconstruct Fu Manchu.” It’s just racist, man. The Fu Manchu stereotype is already bad. There’s nothing to satirize about it. But when Li Long Chang is in his half-human form, he’s got more Big Trouble in Little China about him than Fu Manchu. That’s the vibe.

But yeah, I did sit with the appropriation question. That late-'90s white-boy sheer fucking audacity, the whole, “We can joke about anything" attitude. I’ve already said, looking back, a lot of us got that wrong. There was a lot of stuff then that, in hindsight, wasn’t as ironic or subversive as we thought it was.

But with Phoo Action, I’m looking at something that was already part of my culture when I was growing up. Late-‘70s, early-‘80s TV. Monkey, The Water Margin shows, as I have said. Those were huge in the U.K. They were imports from Hong Kong and Japan, but they became part of British pop culture. I grew up with them. So when I’m writing Li Long Chang, I’m not mocking that mythology, I’m taking it at face value. I’m using those reference points with respect for the source but through a pop culture lens.

And at the end of the day, he’s a demon. He’s not Chinese, he’s not human anymore. He’s ancient. When he brings a hell to earth, it’s not a Chinese hell, it’s just hell. Pure carnage, pure evil, pure destruction. The fact that it all emanates from “Ancient China” in the story? That’s because that’s what the bloody restaurant was called. That’s the joke.

If that’s where he was last, when the Buddha captured him, in China, then that’s part of his makeup. He’s been imprinted with the culture he was trying to take over. But really, he’s just evil, full stop. Who’s to say Li Long Chang’s spirit couldn’t pop up in an American demon? Or a European one? And actually, he does. He manifests through all these grotesque European demons in London as his “Banquet of Evil” takes hold. Pure Hieronymus Bosch shit.

He’s not some commentary on China. He’s just the embodiment of destruction. The Buddha captured him and now he’s been delivered, as this corrupting essence, to his descendant Curly Chang, a third generation British-Chinese nepo baby. One of Whitey’s party mates. That’s where it all kicks off.

From there, I didn’t feel the need to satirize old-school racist portrayals of Asian characters. That’s not an axe I need to grind. I’m not giving it a pass, but I’m not giving it any oxygen either, it’s just boring. It’s crap. Fuck that. Fuck racism. So instead, I asked, “How can I do something different? Something that’s fun, interesting, and actually has value?”

Now, would the comic have played out exactly like this? No idea. I can’t tell you what the comic would’ve been, only what I did with the material in front of me. I went back to the first episode, the outline, all the comics, everything we were planning for the next arc, and thought, Alright, where do I stand on this now? How do I make this all line up?

And you actually asked me earlier what it was like coming back and writing in the same tone, and I completely tangent-ed away from it. But I wrote each bit separately. The prose? Three months. Then another month writing all the introductions. My foreword. Then I had to go back and rewrite some of the comics because, honestly, there was stuff in there Jamie and I discussed and went, “Yeah, we don’t want to be saying that anymore.”

You can satirize without being offensive. And I think if you look at what we did, you can say hand on heart, we weren’t knowingly sexist, homophobic, or racist. But we grew up in a sexist, homophobic, racist culture. And whether you mean to or not, that shit gets into your work. Into your worldview. So I had to look at certain things and say, “No. I’m not having Terry called that. That’s just not on.” That character’s backstory is blatantly bullshit. Whatever. Because I know the intention wasn’t bad when we were doing stuff back in the late '90s, but the potential impact? Yeah, no way.

First time I read the whole book cover to cover was when I had my first printed copy in hand. Before that, I’d only read it in sections, writing, editing, proofing, many passes. But all separate sections. I’d never just sat down and experienced it as a reader. Not going from cover to cover. And honestly, I had a moment of “Oh, shit. Does the prose actually gel with the comics? Did I get it right?” And then I started reading and thought. “Phew! Thank Fuck. It does. We nailed it.”

I dunno. How do you feel? Do you think it all lines up?

I think it does. It’s so different because like you were saying earlier, to get the interiority in the comic is to have one panel by itself whereas in the prose we get to hear Whitey talk for two paragraphs, which is more than we hear in all of Get the Freebies combined. Totally different.

I breathed a sigh of relief when I read that first paragraph of the prose in my first full sitting with the book. I was like, “That’s Whitey.” It still feels like her. And that’s what I wanted.

Yeah, it’s different. It has to be. The medium changes the experience. In the comics, Whitey barely says anything, despite it being told from her perspective, her whole interior world is still implied a lot more, in a single panel, a glance, a pose. But in prose, you get paragraphs of her voice, her thoughts. She’s still her. It’s more of her. That fundamentally shifts how you engage with her, but I don’t think it makes her a different character.

No, I don’t think so. I think it gives a new perspective.

Exactly. And it fills in a lot of gaps, gaps you want filled after reading the comics. You finish them and think, “Wait, why are they doing this? What’s actually going on between them?” That’s what I realized. This was my chance to dig into that.

Because Get the Freebies was this fast, satirical, offhand puncturing of late ‘90s media and celebrity. It wasn’t about filling in the blanks. It was about firing off these mad, kinetic, punchlines and visuals. But in doing that, all these dynamics were created, all these characters and relationships, and we’d left so much unsaid. So I looked at it and thought, “Right. This is my opportunity. Take it.” I never got to write any extended prose with Gorillaz, but now I have written this. A little taste of what could have been.

I want to ask you a little bit about celebrity culture across Get the Freebies, Phoo Action, and Gorillaz. In reading it, there’s always a playful criticism of celebrity culture, but there’s real time interaction with celebrities in pop culture that led to the success of The Face and Deadline. How would you describe the stance on celebrity culture in Phoo Action in specific, in the comic originally, and then how it changes in the novel?

Well, there’s definitely a suspicion of celebrity running through it. And I think that’s changed over time. It’s lessening. We’re becoming more and more Americanized in how we engage with fame. Back then, we were deeply suspicious of it. We were all coming up in this scene, watching people we knew, mates from art school, people we’d been on the piss with, suddenly becoming famous. Properly famous. Not just cool-famous, but tabloid famous. And it was surreal.

One minute, they’re at the club with you. Next minute, they’re on News at Ten or being absolutely shredded in the tabloids. And it wasn’t just musicians. Illustrators, photographers, club kids, indie film directors. The whole Britpop era blurred those lines between art, music, and media, and we were all swirling around in that. It felt like anyone could suddenly become a household name, but there was no real roadmap for what to do when it happened.

And we were always side-eyeing it, flagging the V’s. Get the Freebies was part of that. The comics were this kind of ridiculous, heightened satire of the whole thing: celebrities as superheroes, pop stars as crime fighters, media and consumerism as this insatiable, all-consuming monster. But it was also informed by the fact that we were adjacent to all of it. It wasn’t some detached, lofty critique. We knew these people. We’d seen the machine up close.

By the time I came to write the novel, that perspective deepened. Because in ‘97, we were in it, experiencing that era as it was happening. But revisiting it with 25 years of distance? You see the patterns more clearly. You see how some people survived fame and how others got absolutely chewed up by it. Whitey, in the novel, is that: the pop star, the superhero, the tabloid darling, and fodder. The system makes her and destroys her at the same time. And that’s what I wanted to really explore. What it actually means to be famous at 16, to be treated like a commodity.

So, yeah, it shifts. The comics lampoon celebrity culture in this gleeful, madcap way, but the novel? The novel actually sits with it. It asks, What’s the cost of all this?

How does Cherry Pye factor into this change in celebrity culture?

MW: Yeah, Cherry was originally a character in the TV series. And at one point, I was really adamant about jettisoning all of that, treating the BBC work like it existed in a completely different universe. But James, my editor, is a real completionist and wanted to look at everything from the show, all the characters, all the storylines, to see what was worth salvaging. He was really keen on Cherry. And instead of resisting for the sake of it, I thought, “Alright, let’s see how she could actually be useful.”

And it clicked. She became a way to really dig into celebrity journalism, that whole hypocrisy of these people who make a living whipping up scandals, dragging people through the mud, while being absolute hedonists or worse behind the scenes. She lets us explore that side of things in a way that wasn’t there before. And then I did this thing with Cherry that even surprised James. I didn’t just make her a villain. I wanted to see how she ticked, what motivated her, who she really was. It would’ve been easy to leave her as this cartoonish media vulture, but I didn’t want to do that.

I sat with her compassionately, tried to understand her. Because that’s the thing, right? Everyone’s the hero of their own story. She’s still part of the hypocrisy, still feeding the machine, but I wanted to know why. What’s driving her? What does she think she’s doing? It made her more interesting. And I think it makes the satire sharper too because it’s not just saying, “Oh, these people are all scumbags.” It’s saying, “Look at how this whole system works, and look at the people caught in it.”

Cherry’s actually based on someone I knew in London in the late '90s, early 2000s, a BBC presenter and journalist. But, like most of the characters, she’s an amalgamation. Everyone in the book is. I mean, it’s like Truman Capote, right? Not that I’m calling myself Truman Capote ... [Laughs] But Whitey too. She’s a mix of so many women I knew from that time. Their quick wit, their absolute disdain for idiots, their fierce loyalty to their friends, their colossal constitutions. The kind of women who could be three sheets to the wind at 3 AM and still be sharper than anyone else in the room. Women who did not give a fuck.

There’s something to be said about this pre-internet age where you’re using print media, and the instantaneous reaction of today, of 2025. The way we interact with celebrity culture is so different. I think you capped the chronology of the story in the mid-aughts?

Get the Freebies ends in 2004. Phoo Action happens over 2005, 2006. Social media exists, Facebook is there, but it’s still small, not the beast it is now. But like I said, magazines and the music press back then were just a long-form version of today’s snarking, quipping, and clout-chasing on social media. Everything changes, but it all stays the same.

The way we interact with celebrity culture now is different, but the mechanics are the same. Back then, it was all in print: magazines, tabloids, the music press. All long-form takedowns and snark dressed up as journalism. Now it’s just faster, more relentless, and algorithmically weaponized. It’s less grass roots now, more corporatist. But the feeding frenzy, the hypocrisy, the cycle of building people up just to tear them down? That’s always been there. Phoo Action lands right in the middle of that shift, where old-school media is still clinging on, but the internet is creeping in, ready to change the game.

I’m just writing a story with one foot in fantasy and the other in real London – just one step to the left. Anyone real can turn up in it ... except for Gorillaz. That’s my rule.

I saw Gorillaz on a print in Whitey’s bedroom in the TV pilot.

Yeah, I was thinking about that. If I ever did more stories, would they be listening to Gorillaz? Would there be some commentary on them as a band? Like, “Those idiots, Albarn and Hewlett — what’s his name who did Metal Woman?” as it says in Get the Freebies. It could work that way.

People always ask if Tank Girl, Terry and Whitey, and Gorillaz exist in the same universe. And it’s like, well, there’s not a Hewlett-verse, but they’re in the same lexicon. It’s a fucked-up family that doesn’t communicate with one another.

Thank God there’s not a Hewlett-verse.

It’d be fucking brilliant. [Laughs] The Phooniverse is a shit pun I have been known to resort to. I like puns.

Whenever I hear a something-verse, it’s just marketing.

Yeah, it’s rubbish. Exactly.

It reminds me of the latest Gorillaz album. I don’t know if you’ve listened to Cracker Island.

I’ve listened to it once. Okay, I’ll give you a bit of background. I’m a Gorillaz fan, but only for the art. When I left, I decided to only interact with it as a consumer. The music’s not really for me anymore. Not after the second album, really.

People ask if I regret leaving Gorillaz, and I don’t, because it wasn’t the right place for me to be anymore. On that level, no regrets at all. Would I have loved to be involved if it had been the right environment? Sure. I loved everything around the second album. It would have been amazing to develop what I’d helped set up and continue on that trajectory. And I was probably the only lifelong De La Soul fan involved — except maybe Cass [Browne] — so missing out on being around them stung. But now? I just enjoy seeing Jamie’s art. That’s my connection to it.

I think this relates more to his art than the rest of the album. In Cracker Island, Murdoc is this cult leader.

Right.

You have all these different religions. He’s wearing papal robes, wearing Buddhist headdresses, all this stuff. I saw some critics saying the album wasn’t high concept because it was too disjointed. But in looking at the artwork surrounding it, it’s like this is a pop cult. This is what social media stars are. It’s all disjointed. It’s all aesthetics.

But that’s it, isn’t it? When I grew up in the UK, you had to be part of a tribe. You were either a Punk, a Skinhead, or a Mod. And that was serious. You got beaten up for what you wore. It wasn’t just aesthetics; it was identity. You didn’t cross over. If you were a Casual, a Teddy Boy, a Goth, you stuck to your lane. Now, everything’s just aesthetics. It’s all surface. And I think that’s a really interesting take on Gorillaz now — probably more generous than I’d be, but I get it.

Then again, I can see why people think it didn’t deliver on the high concept, but at the same time, you’re right. I’ve never personally thought Gorillaz should be this big, perfectly interconnected, ongoing narrative. That’s not what a band is. That’s what film, cartoons, and TV do. A band is a work of art that happens in real time. It’s as much about the music as it is about the image, the interviews, the music video directors, the stylists, the photographers—all these people interpreting the music and the lives behind it. It evolves. It contradicts itself. It gets messy. That’s what makes it feel alive.

For me, what I did, my role in the band, was always about bridging the music, the visuals, the design. Building the digital and press world where it all came together and felt cohesive. That’s what I always loved about it. So with Cracker Island, yeah, I think that’s a really interesting critique. Is that what they were going for? Maybe. I’ve heard them talk about the story, and I loved that. It makes total sense. The age the characters all are, where they’re at in their careers, that they decamped to Hollywood and made a pop album. They’re in the Hollywood Hills, working with big producers, and of course, in the Hollywood Hills, there’s a cult. That part? That’s fucking spot on. But does that come across in all the touch points? I don’t know.

But there are also no tenets to the cult, right? There’s no real background to it because we have cults of celebrity everywhere. Even our politics are cults of celebrity, cults of aesthetics. There’s nothing there.

I don’t think you’re being generous at all there. I think Jamie and Damon are very, very smart men, and that’s exactly what they’re saying: it’s all a cult. People miss that because they’re too busy going, “Well, we want the story lore, like from Phase One, Two, and Three.” They want some grand, ongoing narrative, and then they argue about none of the lore matching up.

Arguing theology.

Bingo! But that’s the point. The whole thing is a commentary on the way celebrity works now. How everything is aesthetics, branding, and tribal allegiance. There are no tenets to the cult. That is the tenet.

And look, as much as I go on about Stan Lee and the Marvel Method and all that, what I’ve actually done with Phoo is the antithesis of that. I sat down and wrote a fucking story. I’m the writer, and this is how it goes. I took all these disparate, contradictory ideas and weaved them into a proper continuity. And honestly? I kind of did that as a response to the endless bickering about lore in the Gorillaz fandom. You want lore? “Here. Eat this.”

Jamie isn’t interested in continuity. That’s just not how he works. And that’s part of why he wanted to work with me after I did the Penthouse comic. Because I took something that had no business being there and dropped a Molotov cocktail in it. “Yeah, try to jerk off to that, I dare you.” It’s filthy, but it’s not erotic. That’s what I was doing, throwing a spanner in the works, fucking with the expectations of what it was supposed to be.

Skewering celebrities was integral to Gorillaz too with your work at Phase One, explicitly so on Celebrity Takedown, which you mentioned was the first thing that came out after you had left the project. Did you see your work in Phase One as a direct continuation of Phoo Action?

Yes and no. Only in that it’s me and it’s Jamie. So, of course, there are ideas, themes, and things we didn’t get to do that carried over. I look at Cracker Island’s demon, or The Boogeyman before that, and I think, “Yeah, fucking Li Long Chang or The Stinkbomber.” That’s not a criticism. It’s just, there are things that were left on the table, ideas that naturally resurfaced. Neither Jamie nor I knew I’d one day sit down and pull together this definitive Phoo thing, but you can see the connective tissue now that I have.

You could ask: “Is Get the Freebies a continuation of Tank Girl?” No, but you can see the DNA. You can see what carried over, what got integrated, what evolved. This is the “Hewlett-verse.” This self-referential lexicon. The thing we were saying, and what we were going to keep saying, was “Isn’t this all ridiculous?” Look at what you call reality. Look at what you worship. Look at what you do to people.

I just watched The Complete Unknown. You see what happened to [Bob] Dylan. Or at least this version of Dylan. He realized they wanted to package him, keep him playing guitar and harmonica, keep him locked in this one-man band image. And he went, “Fuck that.”

People always get this wrong. There’s this idiotic, literalist reading that says, “The music industry is satanic, you sold your soul to the devil.” No. The devil is Mammon. The devil is Greed. Whatever culture you want to look at, it’s the same. In Buddhism, it’s Mara, delusion. It’s not a real, physical demon. It’s an allegory. This idea that all of this is real, our culture, when in a hundred years, none of it will exist. It’s all an illusion. And yet, at the same time, it’s not. That’s the paradox.

So when people say the music industry is satanic, what they mean, or what they’re alluding to, without even realizing it, is that it serves materiality. It’s a business. Capitalism eats its young. You look at the ’60s, all these countercultural artists being hoovered up by record labels, and it’s like, “The Times They Are a-Changin.’” Are they? Punk. “Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?” You bet! Rave. “What time is love?” God only knows. Because the machine just took those radical voices, wrapped them in a bow, and sold them via the system they were meant to be rebelling against. That’s the Faustian pact.

Just another Elvis.

Poor fucking Elvis. That’s why Gorillaz was such a brilliant statement. Not the ridiculous, lore-heavy stories people obsess over. Those were written for shits and giggles. The real point was that a cartoon band is the perfect pop star. A reflection of the machine. A story with no reality behind it. A prepackaged product from the start.

So that’s what we were saying about pop stars and rock stars and TV stars in The Face and what the retelling of the prose story delves into, at least that’s part of it, the subtext. And that is really what Gorillaz was. 100%. Oh, you want to manufacture bands do you?

Then watch this.

And we were saying, all bands are manufactured. Image is curated. Shock sells. And it’s been that way for decades. In one of the Gorillazbitez, Murdoc’s dressed up as a Nazi, and Russel’s just like, “You can’t fucking do that.” And Murdoc’s response? “Why not? If it’s good enough for Lemmy, Keith Richards, and Leonard Nimoy, it’s good enough for me.”

And that’s the joke. He’s not just being an edgelord, it’s referencing how pop and rock music have always flirted with fascist aesthetics, repurposing them for shock value, for theatre, for rebellion that isn’t actually rebellion. Bowie did it, Siouxsie did it, Lemmy collected the memorabilia. There’s this whole history of rock stars playing with that imagery while pretending it’s just about aesthetics.

Murdoc’s the logical extreme of that. He’s calling it out while being completely oblivious to what he’s actually doing. Because he’s not real. He’s a cartoon, a construct, a pile of tropes stitched together to expose how ridiculous the whole machine is. The industry sells you rebellion, packages up controversy, recycles it, and pretends it’s dangerous when it’s just another product. And Murdoc is that industry logic taken to its most absurd conclusion.

People get sad that Gorillaz doesn’t have that edge anymore, but it can’t. The fanbase is younger now, and they’ve got no context for any of it. If they tried to push boundaries, all they would get is clap back online. No discussion, no nuance, just “NAZI!” shouted into the void. The culture’s changed. The internet flattened everything, so satire just gets taken at face value.

I don’t want to get into the lore universe stuff, but we have Jimmy and Chien in the Kong Studios game. And Li Long Chang is in the “Punk” live performance video too, which is one of the first of the Gorillaz. At that time, what was the status of the characters? Did they feel like fodder because the project wasn’t going anywhere?

Yeah, they were Easter eggs. We came from a video game culture, and we wanted to treat the project the same way: little hidden details for people to find. At the time, we thought, “Oh, this stuff might never be used again, so why not throw it in?” We knew these characters, we loved them, so we slotted them in where we could. Jimmy was lurking in the corridors of Kong Studios, Chien was playing PlayStation in the toilets, Terry, Whitey, and Chief Benson were avatars in the Chat-O-Matic.

And the whole thing was this big, hungry beast. We had a massive website to fill, Jamie was drawing constantly for press, covers, videos. So it was like, “What do we have lying around? Oh, we’ve got these characters we love; let’s put them in.” Then fans could go back and dig deeper, piece things together. Same with the bookshelves in Kong Studios, or the hard drives fans could rummage through. It was all about pointing people toward stuff we cared about—our own work, but also other influences we wanted them to discover.

Jamie has a dragon he keeps using as a graphic motif all through Gorillaz. On clothes, instruments, patches, posters, stickers. That image comes from Terry’s Shaolin Buddha Finger t-shirt. So he’s still keeping that tradition alive. It’s one of those little through-lines that ties everything together, these visual echoes that keep resurfacing across his work.

As we touched on briefly, the biggest divide from Gorillaz to Phoo Action is the technological gap. You have the internet and then you have print media. What were some opportunities you had with internet culture that you didn’t with print media?

But there was no internet culture.

Well, you kind of made it. You were there with eBaums World, things like that.

Yeah, there wasn’t really an “internet culture” as we know it now. We were right on the bleeding edge of that. People told us you couldn’t do what we were trying to do. We just happened to be lucky that broadband speeds were opening up and Flash had been invented. My brief for Kong Studios was basically Jamie and Damon sitting around playing Resident Evil on their big plasma TVs saying, “We want this.” Up until then, it was all text-based chat forums. People pitched that to us too. “Oh, community is what the internet is about, Gorillaz should be a forum.” And yeah, that was part of it. But we were also looking at things like JibJab, little animations, comedy sites, stuff that was actually fun. That was way more inspiring to us.

Again, I guess we were just doing what we’d always done, looking at the media we loved and asking, “How do we do an homage to video games, cartoons, films, all the stuff we dig?” And I’m always looking at creativity as problem-solving. That’s what creativity is, in some part. Like, “How do we make what’s essentially 2D feel 3D? How do we make it feel like you’re moving through a space when it’s actually just a website?” And when no one says it’s possible, in 2000. We wanted every touchpoint with Gorillaz. Whether it was the site, the interviews, the music videos, the artwork to feel like one immersive world. That was my version of narrative-building. It wasn’t about lore. It was about making everything feel cohesive and inhabited.

And one of the ways of doing that for me was linking to other sites. Now, people would call that a good web strategy because it drives traffic back, but I wasn’t thinking about that. I just wanted it to feel like Kong Studios bled into the internet itself. That there was no hard stop between where Gorillaz ended and the rest of the digital world began. It’s the same approach we had with Get the Freebies. An episode might start in the real world, like Steve Lamacq and Jo Whiley’s Radio 1 show, and then suddenly you’re inside Steve Lamacq’s body, traveling down the end of his knob in a tiny submarine.

That’s basically what we were trying to do with Gorillaz. We were trying to enter Steve Lamacq’s knob. [Laughs]

It’s a very poetic way of putting it.

That’s the connection between Gorillaz and Get the Freebies, blurring the line between the story world and the real world. We were always trying to make it feel like it was leaking into reality. And sometimes, fuck me, it was real. I was in the Gorillaz chatroom, talking as the characters, and then I was writing their NME interviews in the same voice. Of course, it all felt connected for fans because it was. We were telling what was called a transmedia story, that was the industry term for it. At the time, we were just making it up as we went along. The Marvel Method meets the music industry.

I’d been really into that idea for years, even back in art school. I’d studied how film could expand, how people had done transmedia marketing events for movies, things like calling a phone number to get a cryptic message, which would send you on a hunt to a physical location and that somehow connected with the film narrative. That kind of stuff fascinated me.

So with Gorillaz, I was always thinking: “How do we do that? How do we make something that’s completely fictional reach out and touch the real world?” That was always the aim.

You’ve talked elsewhere about when you left Gorillaz after phase one, you left because it was always going to be Jamie and Damon’s project, first and foremost. In the short film you made, Charts of Darkness, there’s this moment where they’re sitting in silhouette. And I’m paraphrasing, but they say there’s two silhouettes, but there could be 50 sitting here.

Yeah, but there’s fucking not, is there?

No, there’s not.

There’s not 50. You can say that, and you can sound like you’re really altruistic, but it’s not, because everyone could have been in that shot.

What was it like to be integral in the success of this global phenomenon project, but in the shadows of the shadows?

It was really tough. I’ll tell you what I thought when I was 18, and it’s very different from how I see it now. Back then, I expected to be part of something big. My friends were successful, so why not me? I didn’t know what it actually meant to be involved in something massive. I tried and tried to create something big, and then suddenly, I was, but no one knew who the fuck I was. Now, looking back, I can see that was just my ego getting bent out of shape. But at the same time, getting credited wouldn’t have hurt the project. It wouldn’t have changed anything. If I think about it now, it’s like looking at the credits roll at the end of a film, thousands of people, all integral to making that thing happen, and they get credited. That’s just the right way to do it.

But you’re number three or four, right?

Absolutely. That’s right. I was number three or four. But that’s a weird place to be. There was a glass ceiling. I had massive free rein because Jamie was so busy, but Damon was suspicious of me. He didn’t know if I had the chops. And looking back, I get that. I had to prove myself over time, and I did. Everything I was working on was turning up in national newspapers and international magazines. And my two best friends, Jamie and Damon, were already famous.

So in my head, I was in the band. I was part of Gorillaz. But in reality, in the eyes of the world? I fucking wasn’t. At the start, the idea was that no one would be named because it would ruin the conceit, not even Jamie and Damon. But then, obviously, that went out the window when the press embraced them as the masterminds behind it. And now I look at it, and I just think, “Well, it doesn’t ruin The Simpsons that everyone knows Matt Groening created it.” Who cares? You still love Homer saying, “Doh!”

These days, Remi [Kabaka Jr.] is credited as an ongoing part of Gorillaz, a musician in the band. That wasn’t possible when I was involved. And yeah, it bent me out of shape. I wasn’t mature enough or experienced enough to deal with it. I just got pissed off and left. But there are two sides to it. I walked away and I faced reality. Gorillaz was Jamie and Damon’s partnership. That was never going to change. I was always going to be up against that ceiling. So I thought, fuck it, I’ve got to go do my own thing.

The problem was, I was jumping off something that high. And where do you go from there? Maybe if I’d been older, more experienced, more professional, I’d have stuck it out and eventually gotten my due. But I was too full of piss and vinegar. I couldn’t play the long game. So I fucked it off. It was also a bit of a vipers nest. What’s that thing they say? “Success had a thousand fathers but failure is an orphan.” Well, this was a huge success and everyone was green eyed and wanting a piece. My position wasn’t contractually locked in so the knives were out. Fuck that. It started as me being brought into the fold by two of my best friends. Us against the world, but it became each man for himself. Nah, you’re alright. I’m out.

They’re maybe the biggest bands of the aughts.

Where do you go from there? I mean, it got me a really fucking high-paying advertising gig. I wasn’t famous, but I was making good money, working on big global brands. I was young, and I had an ego. Part of me wanted recognition. When I started, music video directors were pop stars. Chris Cunningham, Spike Jonze. They were names. But I’m not Chris Cunningham. [Laughs]

At the time, I felt like I was never going to get the recognition I wanted as part of Gorillaz. And should I have? Well, now people know. People know what I did, and that’s enough. I’m not Jamie, I’m not Damon, and that’s fine. I’ve got my own weird little niche with Phoo Action to plow, and my own films. That’s a completely different thing.

You’ve mentioned you had struggles with mental health before, was this after leaving Gorillaz?

No, long time after. Well ... actually, now that you mention it, yeah, maybe I did have a bit of a breakdown then. You’re good. I probably did. It was tough. Imagine being part of this massive thing, right? And I was number three or four on the creative side. Number two on the visual side. And then suddenly, I wasn’t part of it anymore. And then the next album comes out, and I can’t go anywhere without hearing it. I walked away, and it wasn’t a happy ending. I didn’t know what I was going to do next. I was still seeing them, still getting invited to everything, and I’d go along, but it just felt ... off. Like, “Oh, fuck.”

By then, I was having trouble with alcohol and drugs. I’d been around it for years, so substance abuse was part of the landscape. I was oscillating between getting clean and relapsing, and they were all still partying hard. So I’d show up, but it wasn’t the same. It’s different when you’re working and partying — it feels part of something. But when you’re on the outside looking in? That’s when the demons start creeping in. The fear, F-E-A-R, right? Fuck me. All the self-doubt, all the recrimination. It was a wonky time. Mr. Fucking Wonky was haunting me.

But my actual breakdown, the one I mentioned, came much later, late 2016. A combination of things. I’d left a film company for very similar reasons to leaving Gorillaz. I was an employee there, and I just thought, “What am I doing?” I left Gorillaz to do my own thing. I managed to get the Phoo Action pilot made, and then that fell apart. So I went into production, working for other people again, and I just hit a wall. I couldn’t keep doing it.

It was never about chasing fame for its own sake, for empty recognition. I just wanted to make my own things. That’s the whole point of being an artist, isn’t it? You’re trying to express your view of the world in a way that means something to yourself, and hopefully to someone else too. You’re just driven to say it, to get it out, and then you hope it connects. You hope you’re doing it with some integrity, and that integrity comes through. You’re looking so deeply at what it is to be alive, and if you get it right, someone sees or hears what you’ve made and goes, “Yeah. That’s what that feels like.” That’s all it is, in a nutshell.

In Phoo Action, you strike the line between artist and conservator. You have all this old material and you’ve mentioned how Jamie’s philosophy is to just keep going, not to look back. Don’t worry about lore. Don’t worry about continuity. None of that stuff.

Don’t worry about his archive.

How did you understand your role as conservator and creator? Did you know you were going to be collecting this ephemera? How do you understand your role when you’re making this book?

I’m in a privileged position because I’ve got that kind of access. I’ve had this decades-long, checkered relationship with a cultural icon, and there’s this whole body of work, this IP, that most people don’t even know exists. So as much as I’m a creator in it, I also feel a duty of care as its keeper. And those two things don’t feel like they’re in conflict. It’s just all part of it.

Retouching a piece of artwork, working on a layout, writing. It’s all the same creative process to me. Look at this. [Holds up page from Phoo Action] “Photocopy, magic marker on artboard. 1997.” It’s not like I draw a distinction between choosing a font, how the page is laid out, or the language choices I’m making. They’re all different expressions of the same thing. I like doing this stuff. As I say, it’s a privilege.

Yeah, you can see your design aspect throughout the book. Even just the photos of how you’re depicting things. It’s all very intentional. And not just a normal photo shoot, but something you clearly thought about.

Well, I’m glad you picked up on that because there’s a lot of thought behind it. A lot of people who’ve interviewed me so far haven’t actually seen the physical book, just the PDF, so they’re missing that part of the experience. The physicality of the book. It’s size. Finish. Quality.

I wear a lot of hats. We’ve talked about all my experience, interests, and work history, and one of those things is that I’m a trained graphic designer, that’s where it all started, and an ex-advertising art director. So yeah, this is Jamie’s art, but my art is how you present it, how you photograph it, how you scale it up, how it sits on the page, frame it, retouch it. That’s all part of the storytelling.

I love the shot of the phoomobile with the actors.

There are all these photographs that were never shown before. [Flips to another page of Phoo Action] These aren’t just straightforward studio shots of the cast. Each of them was photographed separately, in this little room upstairs in the church where we shot the final fight sequence. And this — this — was always how it was meant to be seen. Finally, I get to present them as they were intended.

I know most people are probably just going to flick past it and go, “Oh, cool, some behind-the-scenes stuff.” But I appreciate that you actually took the time to go through it and recognize that this is my art. My art is in the choice of paper, the texture of it, the silver edging. My art is in scouring eBay for this. [Holds up Matchbox Superfast Beach Buggy No. 30] The exact same toy car Jamie had sitting on his desk when he designed the Phoomobile, and one I had as a kid too. My art is in pulling together these layers, like those toilets from Kong Studios, with Chien sitting in them. Those are my photos.

I did a David Hockney-style photo joiner for the website back in the day. It’s all these little connections, built over years. I started off wanting to be a comic book illustrator, but I realized storytelling and illustration can be anything you put on a page or present to the world.

Different in execution, but so is this book.

Yeah, I appreciate you picking up on that. I took the Freebies acid — the Albert Squares — and had a 3D render made so it actually looks like real acid. Those little details, the things that swirl around in my head. How can I bring this world to life? How can I illustrate this book in a way that feels tactile, immersive? It’s all about pulling in those elements that make it feel real, even though it’s completely absurd. So, again, there’s that Gorillaz through line, like all the plate photography and 35mm filming I did for the Tomorrow Comes Today video.

I think when we first talked, we were saying how there’s a lot of meat to this book because there can be a lot of design filler with these big four-, five-, six-hundred page collections, omnibuses, whatever.

Exactly. Just junk, right? A lot of these big collections, they’re padded out, just filler. You flick through once, maybe admire the production values, and then you’re done. There’s nothing left to dig into. It’s all surface, no depth. You don’t get the rejected designs, the roughs, the proofs, the process. You only see the polished final product, which is fine, but it’s only half the story.

That’s what I love about this book. No one’s ever seen all of this together before. Even Jamie and I hadn’t seen it all together like this. And I knew if I don’t do this now, it’s never going to be seen. No one was out there demanding this book, but I didn’t care. I was going to put it out there.

One thing I keep hearing when people finally get their hands on this book is how much bigger it is than they expected, how much higher quality, how every single detail, the materials, the finish, the design has been thought through. That’s incredibly rewarding. Not for my ego, but because I wanted to do right by Phoo Action, finally. To present it the way it always should have been presented, to show it in all its glory, to do it justice.

Some publishers I re-pitched it to actually said, “Well, we think you should drop the second half, the TV stuff.” And I just thought, “No, absolutely not.” That’s the whole point. It’s part of the Phoo Action story. If you don’t understand how it all relates back, if you can’t see the full arc of the IP, then you’re missing what makes it unique.

And beyond that, the way I’ve documented Phoo Action in this book isn’t just about nostalgia or archiving. It’s hands-on experience, real insight. I’m an elder now in the creative industries. Whether I like it or not, I’ve been around long enough to have seen how this all works, how to get a project off the ground, how it can go wrong, who you work with, who you don’t. In a way, it’s me talking to the kid I was when I went to art school, totally clueless about how to get a job. If my son came to me and said, “How do you actually make a living as an artist, Dad?” I’ve got an answer for him. This book is packed with those answers.

This book isn’t just about the art or the story. It’s about how things happen, and just as importantly, how they don’t. It’s a case study in what goes right, what goes wrong, and the reality of making things in this industry: the deals that collapse, the compromises, the politics, the missed opportunities.

It’s also about people. Who you work with, who you don’t. How the right collaborators can elevate something, and the wrong ones can sink it before it even starts. That’s why telling the whole story of Phoo Action mattered because if you’re a young artist, writer, or filmmaker, there are lessons in here. Hard-earned ones.

What are Jamie’s thoughts on the book?

As I say in the book, if you know how to do your job, Jamie is incredibly generous. He lets you get on with it, gives you full trust and creative freedom. But if you fuck up, he will shut you down. He’ll take over, redo it, or scrap it entirely. That’s just how he works. Fair enough.

I remember back in the early days of our Zombie Flesh Eaters Studio, we got hired to do an ad campaign for KISS-FM, designing these toy robots. The agency wanted them to look like ‘70s toy packaging, so we found an old-school illustrator who’d done that kind of work before. But when the artwork came back, it just wasn’t up to scratch. The guy couldn’t do it anymore. So Jamie, instead of arguing about it, just sat up all night and redrew all of it himself. That’s the standard. It has to be right.

So when I went to Jamie and said, “I want to make this Phoo Action book,” his response was classic Jamie: “Go for it, Mat. But you’re going to have to do the lion’s share of the work.” And honestly, that was a gift. A major international artist handing me his blessing, saying, “Yeah, I trust you to do this.” But that also meant I had to do it right.

I didn’t just throw everything together haphazardly. I sat down and worked out a proper design language, something that pulled from The Face, from ‘90s aesthetics, but wasn’t just retro pastiche. It had to feel like Phoo Action, like a comic, but also have the integrity of an archival, cultural document. I put together a full tone document and walked Jamie through every stage, design, layout, structure, and he was just like, “Yeah, great, love it.”

But that’s the thing. When someone like Jamie gives you that trust, you have to deliver. And you have those moments, waking up at 4 a.m. in a panic, thinking, “Oh, fuck, what have I taken on?”

In the introduction, you touch on Carl Jung’s idea of synchronicity and the history of Phoo Action certainly lends itself to the concept. Is this the final synchronous moment in Phoo Action?

This book is the culmination and crystallization of everything that’s been. Phoo Action is back out in the world. It lives and breathes again. Would I do an adaptation? 100%. Would I do any adaptation? Absolutely not.

I’m not hungry to do a film or TV show or animation just for the sake of it. I don’t want a deal just to have a deal. “Oh great, you’ve got a deal? Yeah, well, it’s gonna be shit.” That’s what happens. If Amazon Studios and Seth Rogen, or just someone in the same ballpark, wants Always Sunny meets Happy! meets The Boys meets Airplane!, then sure, I’m your man. But if they want something that looks like Jamie Hewlett’s work but is actually just a watered-down, focus-grouped appropriation? Then no thanks. Because we already know what happens: “Terry can’t be gay. Whitey can’t be a junkie. Terry can’t wear a mask. We’ve got to see his eyes. He can’t meditate in the nude.” And at that point, why even bother?

The media landscape is totally different now. The Boys is great. Preacher was fucking brilliant and criminally underappreciated. I don’t get why it wasn’t bigger. Maybe just bad timing. But the second and third seasons of that show? Genius. I’m gutted Steve [Dillon] never got to see it. They’d been trying to get that adaptation made for years. What a tragedy. Anyway, it’s all out there now in a way it wasn’t when I was pitching Phoo Action to the BBC. So if Phoo was ever going to come back in another form, it would have to be exactly what it’s supposed to be. Or nothing at all.

And look, I’ve got other stories in my head. I had a small circle of Gorillaz fans and fan artists reading drafts of the prose while I was working on it, and one of them, who’s a huge fan of the writing I did, of Cass’s writing too, of the pilot, is always hassling me about the Freebies, about more stories. And I get it. But when I was finishing the book, I told him, “Don’t fucking talk to me about it. I’ve been working on this for four years. I’m knackered.”

So will there be more? Maybe. I don’t know. I’ve got a feature film, fully financed and cast, that I’m shooting in Wales as a producer. That’s my grown-up job, my day job. When I come off the back of that, maybe I’ll think about it. But the comics industry is weird, isn’t it?

What’s the best way to do it? What’s the best format for it? That’s the question. There was definitely a lot of industry interest around the book. In the end, I went with Titan because they were the ones to initiate it. They first came to me about it in 2017. They’re in the U.K., which makes a huge difference. I could have a call with them at 10 in the morning and things would actually happen that same day. Compare that to Z2, who were on the West Coast and an absolute fucking nightmare to deal with. And that’s before even getting into all the other fucking nightmares. They were useless arses. And you can quote me on that.

I’m sure you could list a bunch of publishers who you’d expect I’d talk to, and yeah, some of them were interested, some even put deals forward. It wasn’t that they wouldn’t have been good, but I just felt like the right thing to do was to stick with Titan. They’re British. They’re the oldest British comic publisher. They’ve got a history with Tank Girl. They were the first people who ever talked to me about doing a Get the Freebies collection. In hindsight, maybe I should have gone with them from the start. But that’s a long way of saying, “Yeah, there are other publishers I could talk to about future stuff.” Whether they’d still be interested after they’ve seen the dildo-ridden, butt plug-laden, libelous filth I’ve just chucked out? That’s another story.

Or maybe it’s something I Kickstart. Keep it smaller, homegrown. Before I started this book, I actually got on a call with Alan Martin to get his take on how I should do it. And he told me, “Mat, Kickstart it, print it yourself, then license it.” Sell it twice: once to your audience, then again to a publisher. And he’s right. It’s smart. But for what I had in mind, I just couldn’t. This book needed proper production. It needed real infrastructure behind it. Trying to handle that all myself? No chance.

It’s a ton of work.

Yeah, it’s not just the production, it’s the fulfillment too. I didn’t want to be on the hook for hundreds of thousands of pounds and end up in one of those Kickstarters where people are sending me death threats because their book’s a week late. I needed partners on this book. But maybe the next thing should be ... I dunno, something smaller. Something like this [holds up 21st Century Tank Girl]. Asterix was a massive influence. I learned to read with Asterix. That kind of format: short, sharp, satirical, full of stupid names and punch-ups. Perfect for Phoo Action. I could totally see the prose story in this book working as a comic in that style.

So yeah. Maybe is my answer. Maybe. I’ve got an artist I’d love to work with, and we do have a big, ridiculous Google doc full of too many fucking ideas. But how do you make that pay? How do you monetize that? We’re not the Worthing Big Underwear Comics Society anymore, a bunch of 18-, 19-, and 20-year-olds who only had to worry about rent and beer money. We’ve got kids, bills, elderly parents. We need a proper job.

So, is another Phoo Action comic realistic? Well ... if someone’s got the money and doesn’t mind a book full of big fat dumb knob jokes and fight scenes, raging against the absurdity of our clusterfuck corporate hellscape of a culture, give me a call. But that’s the thing, right? Phoo’s never just been about the scraps and the filth. It’s about everything. Celebrity, power, identity, the sheer absurdity of the world we’re in. Satire wrapped in a flying kick. A punchline with actual punches. And if I can find a way to keep that spirit alive and pay the bills? Then maybe, just maybe, there’s another round in us yet.

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